Development Expertise Lab
West Africa — Research and evaluation firm
Running field surveys entirely over WhatsApp
A research firm that repurposed a commerce tool to administer its questionnaires: twenty-two survey waves in four months, zero orders.
- Sector
- Services
- Location
- West Africa
- Activity
- Research and evaluation firm
- Genuka modules
- Campaigns, WhatsApp Inbox, CRM
The starting point
Running a survey with several thousand respondents means successive waves, distinct treatment groups, targeted reminders and an endline measurement — all while keeping track of who answered what. Classic survey tools assume respondents open a link; in West Africa, they answer on WhatsApp.
What was put in place
Each survey wave is a Genuka campaign, each respondent group a segment of the contact base. Answers land in the shared inbox, where the team works through them conversation by conversation. Reminders reuse the same segments, with no file to re-import.
How we work with them
Four months of partnership on a use we had not planned for. We tooled up twenty-two survey waves, got twenty-one message templates approved, and trained the firm's two people to segment their respondents from one wave to the next without ever re-importing a file.
The deployment
- 4
- months of partnership
- 22
- survey waves tooled up
- 21
- message templates approved
- 2
- people trained
- 22 waves sent — baseline questionnaires, treatment groups, reminders and endline measurement.
- A respondent base reusable from one wave to the next, with no file to re-import.
- Every reply handled individually by a team of two.
- 21 approved message templates, reused from one wave to the next.
