How does one change the world? Simple. Vote, recycle and start your own social-impact driven organization with the latest in web and artificial intelligence technology behind it.

We can all agree that getting that first job without a day of experience on your CV was and will forever continue to be a challenge for all youths around the world. With over 60% of Africa's population being youth, the following question arises: how do you harness their power of youth? Heroes4Change set out to create a youth social enterprise that delivers impact at scale - underpinned by the latest web and artificial intelligence technology provided by Google and Incentro Africa to support it.

Heroes4Change is a for-profit service organisation that was founded in 2017 to pool together the energetic, innovative and driven young adults and deliver social impact programmes in their own communities. With these programmes the program would foster confidence, real-world experience and a positive social impact. The programme was incubated by Unilever and over time seceded and became what it is today.

Heroes4Change required tools that would:

  • Share information about the organisation

  • Help recruit Heroes (Volunteers) to programmes

  • Train Heroes following the Hygiene and Behaviour Change Coalition (HBCC)

  • Behaviour change programme by sending training materials including videos, texts, images, reminders via WhatsApp

  • Conduct a quiz/test on Heroes for that training program

  • Analyse the results from the quiz to know

  • Manually send WhatsApp messages (e.g. updates, reminders) to Heroes and receive responses/questions via WhatsApp

  • Allowed Heroes to log their impact in real-time,

  • Give H4C the ability to deploy heroes easily.

These platforms were conceptualized to be the centerpiece of the organisation in terms of recruiting, training, deploying, tracking and monitoring. The solutions we innovated were a conversational AI, a new website and a web platform to manage operations that would allow Heroes4Change to accomplish all these goals and more.

With Dialogflow (a Google Cloud solution), we were able to create a solution that would help in the training of new Heroes via WhatsApp whereas previously H4C would have to embark on journeys across the country to train Heroes in person. This solution allowed for Heroes to remotely chat with the bot and move through the conversation with the help of YouTube videos, Instruction documents and even undergo an exam at the end with instant results.

The next task was to set up Heroes4Change main website. Within three weeks of taking on the project, Incentro’s web developers with WordPress by their side delivered a website that offered visitors information about the organization, registration portals to allow volunteers to apply for the various opportunities available and read and watch testimonies from past Heroes.

The next solution took six months to complete. Creating a tech platform to manage internal operations required React developers (For the Frontend), Java developers (For the Backend) and a GCP Certified Engineer (For reporting via Google Data Studio which is hosted on Google Cloud). With these tools, the platform made the recruitment process easy by automating the shortlisting process, allowing successful candidates to fill daily reports directly from their mobile phones and give Heroes4Change managers the visibility required to track what’s happening in the field at any given time and respond appropriately in a timely manner.

Heroes4Change Connect unlocks a massive opportunity for delivering cost-effective impact at scale. We are able to reduce our recruitment, training, deployment, and impact evaluation cost and create a single view of a program, hero, and client. Previously these were manually generated and took many resource hours. Now clients and program managers are able to access a real-time view of the entire journey.

Shivani NaidooHeroes4Change

The pros of the solutions implemented are:

  • A holistic dashboard to enable easy conversation management. With functionality for the sending and receiving messages with rich information ( e.g media files) directly from the interface.

  • Agent routing: conversations can be easily assigned to agents.

  • Chatbot and AI e.g dialog flow integrations.

  • Contact management functionality

  • Group messaging functionality

The piece of mind of knowing that your IT/Web service provider is knowledgeable of all the available tools and which particular tools would work best for you is simply freeing. There’s no need to think for them, or research and suggest to your provider if they have looked at your researched solution. With Incentro you can rest easy in the knowledge that you have the best support and solutions from the region’s only Google Premier partner.