Desktop software created to lower barriers to positive social change using mobile technology.
About
FrontlineSMS is a desktop software created to lower barriers to positive social change using mobile technology. By leveraging basic tools already available to most organizations, including those in ‘last-mile’ settings — computers and low-cost modems — FrontlineSMS enables instantaneous two-way communication to any mobile handset. It’s easy to implement, simple to operate, and best of all, the software is free; you only pay for the messages you send. Using FrontlineSMS with FrontlineSync, you can also track missed calls for the first time.
Challenge
The Multi Selector is an entirely open source project that has been built flexibly so as not to be only useful in limited areas. To better understand the significance of this release, consider the story of Pakistani civil society organization Strengthening Participatory Organization (SPO).
In 2011, SPO used FrontlineSMS to implement a disaster relief project following monsoon flooding in Sindh, Pakistan’s southernmost province. The flooding affected an estimated 5.5 million people who faced a lack of clean drinking water, food, healthcare, and shelter, which, in turn, resulted in communicable and non-communicable diseases across the province, destruction of agricultural land and livestock, and a loss of livelihoods.
Solution
SPO used FrontlineSMS to receive feedback from flood victims and to monitor its process of distributing food and shelter. It found that building in-person relationships with its beneficiaries was critical for encouraging uptake of the communications system they implemented.
By managing their contacts in groups through FrontlineSMS, SPO could send tailored messages before each of their five partner organizations started the aid distribution process in order to alert the beneficiaries, and could also solicit feedback via SMS following the distribution.
Result
Now, with our newly released Multi Selector tool, this process of selecting contacts and groups from a user’s database is much easier and more efficient.
Users can easily find contacts, groups, or smart groups using whichever combination of mouse or keyboard they prefer. Autocomplete on-the-fly searching provides the users with all contacts matching their input whether it is their Name, Email, Number or even a word buried in the Notes field.
Scrolling is also supporting for those times when you can’t quite remember that name.
References
“The work on this tool was made possible thanks to a wonderful volunteer contribution by the team at SolDevelo. We very much enjoyed working with SolDevelo on this successful project.”
Technologies used
