Group items tagged

We made sure that speech would be as accessible to as many Africans as possible on the radio, TV, and by SMS. These are the speech excerpts that we sent out to thousands of SMS subscribers in Africa and around the world.

If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time.

A big hurdle to using GC is the fact that no one knows it’s your new phone number, and they keep calling your old number. To get the maximum benefit from the service you need to route as many calls through it as possible. The only way to do that is to let your contacts know that your new GC number is the best way to reach you. Before you send out a mass email and reprint a thousand business cards, though, make sure you plan on sticking with the service.

You can customize greetings by specific callers or groups, so business callers can get one message, and friends can get another.

To address problems like these, we planned to supply CSPs with java-enabled phones and utilize the FrontlineSMS Forms Client to allow them to fill out and send in daily reports on services provided.  Using this platform, the 42-field paper form currently being filled out by hand can be compressed down to a single text-message.  After a few days of brainstorming and getting up to speed on SSFP, I headed out to a few field sites to talk with clinic managers and CSPs and introduce the idea to them personally.  Once accustomed to the idea of a real-time communication network, the CSPs began to buzz with ideas exploring how it might be used.