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5 Ways Nonprofit Facebook Messenger Bots Can Deliver Impact | Beth's Blog

5 Ways Nonprofit Facebook Messenger Bots Can Deliver Impact

Digital Trends, Engagement, Experimentation, Innovation, Strategy, Tools and Tactics

My conversation with the Albert Einstein Bot

In my last post about nonprofit bots, I discussed the big picture of automation in the nonprofit space and what I learned from the “The Beth Bot” experiment.    For this post, I did a landscape scan to identify some of the best examples of nonprofit bots.  (These examples use Facebook Messenger, but bots be deployed other platforms or apps.)

What is a Chat Bot? Why Use One?

More and more people are adopting social media messaging, including Facebook Messenger, to contact nonprofits with questions, comments, or requests.  While anyone can message your nonprofit’s brand page 24/7, nonprofit staff don’t always work around the clock to respond. (And, if they do, they need to read my book, The Happy Healthy Nonprofit, to find out why that is not a great idea.)

Facebook Messenger chat bots will let your nonprofit immediately interact with supporters.  Bots can answer basic questions like “How can I learn more,” and offer a link to sign up for your nonprofit’s email newsletters or action alerts.    More sophisticated bots can help educate and engage your supporters about your nonprofit’s issues,  programs or services.

If you are thinking about adding a Facebook Messenger bot to your organization’s digital strategy, spend some time interacting with other nonprofit bots.   While the Facebook Messenger platform has taken some small steps to make bots easier to find,  they are not always easy to discover.   I set up this List to save you some time hunting down nonprofit examples.

Climate Reality Bot

The Climate Reality Bot is designed to educate supporters and build the organization’s email list for action alerts.   Designed with ChatFuel, it is a simple bot, using close-ended options to funnel supporters to different options on the lower rungs of the ladder of engagement.

The task of capturing email addresses from Facebook is completely automated and available 24/7.    This is a simple way to get started using bots strategically and does not take that much upfront design time or customization.    You’d simply track your conversion rate to see how effective your bot is at building your email list and based on results, tweak.

Engage and Educate

The Genius Albert Einstein Bot

It is not necessarily a nonprofit, but I think it is one of the best examples of the potential of bots beyond automated email address capture.

As a promotion for its new show, Genius, the National Geographic Channel has created an Albert Einstein bot for Facebook Messenger. You can discuss life, love, and science—although he’s quick to warn that “I become absent-minded during light conversations that do not involve the physical properties of light.”

The bot is more fun and engaging than most—full of animated gifs, puns,  and witty comments about relativity and robots, even if they don’t match the question you asked.  Obviously, this is a custom programmed Facebook Messenger Bot designed for a conversational experience.

If your organization wants to create something genius like this, it will most likely require time, resources, and outsourced expertise, but it will stand out.

Museum Visitor Experience

The Anne Frank House Bot

Museums have been all over bots on other platforms, see the Momabot on Twitter for example.  So, it comes as no surprise that Museums have been early adopters of Facebook Messenger Bots.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam was one of the first to launch a Facebook Messenger bot.  Facebook Fans can ask the bot for information about the museum, such as opening times and where to buy tickets, or about Anne Frank herself and her history.

The Anne Frank House bot is custom programmed for automated self-learning, using artificial intelligence that allows the bot to learn to recognize the context of questions and to generate specific answers based on that.

The Australia Democracy Museum also has a Facebook Messenger Bot, with similar objectives.

The Pop Bot

The bot is named Missiobot and comes from Missio USA, an organization inside The Pontifical Mission Societies, which is, as the bot states, sort of like the pope’s personal Red Cross.

Shortly after you start a chat with Missiobot, you meet Pope Francis, and it doesn’t take long for a smiley face emoji to be part of your conversation.  The bot is more engaging than most  you encounter on Facebook Messenger, a testament to good design using decision-trees and multi-media content.

But what makes this bot most engaging is good storytelling shared in a conversational way, matching the pope’s tone of voice and illustrated with photos, video, and audio.   The stories are about missionary projects such as helping nuns care for the kids in the slums of Nairobi.

This is storytelling with a purpose, each story ending with the option of taking action,  share the story or donate.

A bot like this could be implemented on any of the bot building platforms, but you’d definitely need to have the content assets, stories, and spend a little time designing the decision-tree.

Health Information Support and Counseling

I discovered a couple of health education bots, I’m sure there are more but as I mentioned they are not easy to find. Here are two examples.

This is a mental health bot, available to anyone via Facebook Messenger looking for some supportive talk to deal with anxiety or depression.  After informing you that is not a human and to dial 911 in the event of an emergency and then encouraging your read the privacy policy, it does a mood assessment.  It then uses CBT techniques to help reframe thought patterns or negative emotions associated with mood disorders like anxiety or depression.

Woebot was built from the ground up based on AI software expertise, working with Stanford AI lab.  They used design thinking to build a “decision tree,” mimicking clinical decision-making with task-specific sections of natural language processing, using a decision-tree.

Momconnect is a bot developed by the  Praekelt Maternal Health, an initiative that uses mobile technology to improve the health of pregnant women, newborns and infants in South Africa.

This Facebook Messenger demo shows how a pregnant mother in South Africa can register to receive free, informative messaging about maternal health and have her questions are fed directly to the organization’s professionals who can respond to her queries and ensure that a high level of service is available at every clinic in South Africa.   The main program is SMS based.

In a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, MIT Research Fellow Michael Schrage proposed a provocative and counter intuitive approach for enhancing innovation and productivity through man-machine collaborations.  Don’t just leverage advanced technologies like bots to automate a work task, but also focus on enhancing innovation and productivity by leveraging technology to create higher-performance versions of employees.

Nonprofit adoption of bots is in the early adopter phase although we are well into the next technology disruption: automation.   When I asked the Albert Einstein Bot whether the robots would take over the nonprofit world, it answered with “Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.”   In other words,  the human element is always going to be important, but perhaps there are ways that we can use bots to make our nonprofits smarter about achieving impact versus automating a task.

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Book Review: Engine of Impact – Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector | Beth's Blog

Book Review: Engine of Impact – Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector

Books, Leadership, Measurement, Philanthropy, Strategy

Last week I attended the launch of the book, Engine of Impact: Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector by William F. Meehan III and Kim Starkey Jonker, with a Foreword by Jim Collins.  The authors identify seven leadership best practices of high performance based on their extensive experience in the nonprofit and philanthropy sector. Together these best practices form an “engine of impact” that nonprofits need to build, maintain, and hone over time to scale with results.

As a member of the Leap Ambassadors Community, a group of nonprofit leaders, funders, and practitioners who believe that performance matters, the book, the ideas and insights shared by the authors resonated.   I wasn’t surprised to receive a copy from Mario Morino, the visionary behind the Leap Ambassadors Community and author of an influential book on the topic, Leap of Reason with a note mentioning that one of the authors, Meehan, is a long-time esteemed colleague and mentor.

The book is a great read, packed with insights as well as high level frameworks and practical applications. This book should be on the holiday reading list for any nonprofit leaders and their boards (and their donors) who want their organizations to thrive and magnify impact.  These principles once applied can help organizations sustain their work because they will be able to attract and leverage funding.

Source: Engine of Impact

As the authors describe, the practice of strategic leadership is not just doing good work but also doing the work in a highly intentional and effective ways.  To explain their approach, they use the metaphor of an engine as illustrated above to break down the components of strategic leadership.  It starts with the organization’s mission or the air.  Next comes the compressor or strategy that takes the air of the mission and applies pressure to it.  In other words, creating a strategic plan.  Impact evaluation is the thrust indicators, providing measurement and evaluation of the performance.

The turbines, which generate power for the engine, are insight and courage.   The fuel for take off includes funding, talent, organization, and governance.   When the engine works well, it creates thrust or impact.  The chapters in the book unpack each of these components that can help nonprofit leaders steer their engines towards greater impact.

The book devotes a chapter to the topic of scaling – which is about how far that engine can take your nonprofit. According to the authors, scaling can be a powerful way to increase impact but for only for certain nonprofits under certain circumstances. The first step is to understand readiness to scale.  On the book site, the authors provide a diagnostic that helps nonprofits gauge that readiness based on assessing all aspects of the engine model.

I love frameworks, but sometimes they are dry and boring. Not in this book. The authors have created a “Readiness to Scale Matrix” which includes five categories, presented with engaging visual metaphors to make it memorable.  This framework was my favorite insight of the many great ideas and advice in the book.

The five categories are:

  • Scale Jail: Nonprofits that do not have a well-built engine and have little or no fuel.
  • Field of Dreams: They have a proven engine of impact but need to develop a solid plan for funding the necessary fuel to scale.
  • Small is Beautiful:   This are small nonprofits that serve a specific population really well and don’t need to scale because they are focused on serving a limited group of specific beneficiaries.   Makes me link of the “Small but Mighty” performance indicators for small nonprofits from Leap Ambassadors.
  • The Waterfall:  This is an organization with a weak engine due to a flawed theory of change and weak impact evaluation, but there is a lot of fuel because the organizational leaders excel at marketing. This is not sustainable.
  • The Promised Land:  The organizations in this category have earned the right to scale because they have a well-built, provide impact model and by finding the fuel that they need to sustain growth.

There are many more great insights in this book for nonprofit leaders. Engine of Impact should be in your essential reading stack now!

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