Nick Scott, Head of Digital at MSF Spain, writes about how the organisation had nice success with the implementation of chatbots because the COVID-19 pandemic unfold the world over. Together with Toni Matas, director at Persualia, Nick spoke about their expertise at #FRO2021 from The Useful resource Alliance.
In March final yr, our world modified from in the future to the following. At MSF Spain, we knew that the lives of our confined audiences had modified vastly. Their days lived on-line. Work on-line. College on-line. Even events on-line.
It was an opportunity for us to attempt a brand new advertising and marketing technique: inbound advertising and marketing.
COVID-19 would require us to launch digital-only advertising and marketing campaigns. Most of those can be campaigns based mostly on interruption by advertisements, through which communication with a possible donor was fast, and the response we sought – a donation – was speedy. And we knew they’d work, as a result of emergency campaigns do work effectively on digital. There’s urgency, the difficulty is well-known, and the necessity is evident.
However there was additionally a possibility to attempt one thing totally different. For the primary time ever, the factor that almost all pursuits MSF – medical-humanitarian motion – was additionally the factor that a majority of individuals in Spain. These had been individuals who had been residing by a medical-humanitarian emergency in their very own nation, and these shared pursuits are the core of sturdy communication.
4 days after the primary lockdown was carried out, we acquired one thing sudden by e mail. It was an inner doc, containing a collection of suggestions to assist workers handle their emotional and psychological well being within the face of the pandemic.
With the arrival of this doc, we noticed a singular alternative. We already knew that psychological well being was a key theme for our audiences. A collection of movies we’d launched providing recommendation on psychological well being in a pandemic was getting attain we hardly ever noticed with our content material, being seen by a whole bunch of hundreds of individuals. We noticed the chance to create a marketing campaign that doesn’t ask for one thing however reasonably affords it. A marketing campaign that doesn’t chase, however attracts.
An opportunity to attempt a brand new device: chatbots
We additionally had an opportunity to check a brand new kind of channel that we knew had the capability to be extremely participating: chatbots. We had been already in negotiations with an company that specialised within the space of chatbots and conversational advertising and marketing and had been satisfied of their potential. Why chatbots?
- They’re very versatile. You should use them to adapt to the wants and responses of every person with totally different journeys, and work with totally different targets with every chatbot (consciousness, engagement, conversion, and so forth.)
- Customers perceive the chat format. Chatbots really feel just like broadly used instruments like WhatsApp and, in contrast to with touchdown pages, customers solely need to course of one piece of data at a time when participating with them
- They’re extremely optimisable. Each click on is an information level. It’s straightforward to grasp the place persons are being engaged and the place they aren’t as a way to rapidly and simply adapt and alter every bit of textual content and each level of interplay
- They will include many types of media and content material. Customers don’t want to go away the chatbot to expertise all the pieces from textual content and video to video games, information seize, and extra
Introducing our chatbot for psychological well being in lockdown
We launched our chatbot at first of April in 2020. The “bot” was truly one among our workforce members: Maria Cecilia from our psychological help unit – we even included her image to reassure customers and make the expertise really feel private. The content material she delivered was based mostly on MSF’s inner psychological well being help doc, however rewritten as a collection of tales within the punchy conversational textual content type of chatbots. It supplied recommendation on eight potential types of emotional stress, with a lot of illustrations to interrupt up the textual content and convey it to life.
Moreover, we created a downloadable lockdown equipment that supplied recommendation and steerage based mostly on the ideas contained throughout the chatbot expertise, together with different assets. Customers who give their contact particulars to obtain the equipment are registered for a follow-up e mail journey, which is the inbound advertising and marketing a part of the equation. Those that gave their particulars had been additionally given an summary of MSF’s operations and the possibility to make a direct distinction by donating to help the combat in opposition to COVID-19.
We added the newly-created chatbot to our coronavirus net pages. Because of their excessive rating in Google for the search phrases “epidemic” and “coronavirus”, these pages had been receiving hundreds of distinctive guests day by day, guaranteeing sturdy preliminary engagement with the chatbot. We additionally posted in regards to the bot on our social media channels, realizing we might anticipate large attain on any content material regarding psychological well being and COVID-19.
Along with e mail advertising and marketing, we additionally developed Fb advertisements to advertise the chatbot and attain an viewers past our most conventional supporter base. Inside the first three weeks, we achieved very promising outcomes:
- Over 100,000 arrived on the level of first interplay
- 71,000 noticed one of many emotional suggestions
- 7,700 leads (2,000 exterior Spain)
- 78 donors (€3,350 donated)
- 33 common donors
One of many bot’s biggest successes was WhatsApp, the place it was shared tens of hundreds of occasions. On one event, a message despatched by me and one other member of my workforce to high school mother and father teams on WhatsApp went around the globe; hundreds of individuals from Guatemala and Mexico had been reached by forwarded messages. Months later, we heard from our psychological help workforce that we’d had sufferers from a centre in Guatemala congratulate our docs on the chatbot!
The chatbot has since been tailored into totally different languages and contexts. However, as lockdown has change into much less strict and the viewers utilizing the unique bot in Spanish has dropped, the price of advertisements has continued to rise. So, now we have continued to optimise and now have to revisit our technique to plan how we’ll use the bot in an always-on means, in a time when COVID-19 is not going to be such an element.
A primary (of many) forays into the world of chatbots
In our digital response to COVID-19, we didn’t cease at only one chatbot. Throughout 2020, we went a little bit chatbot-crazy, releasing a number of bots to satisfy a wide range of totally different targets: peer-to-peer fundraising, engagement, recruitment, common donor acquisition, and extra. Throughout our discuss at #FRO2021, we talked delegates by the seven superpowers of chatbots and the way MSF Spain employed each to check this newest device in our arsenal.
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