Tutorial

Launching your SOLIS bot pilot: the 3-month method

· Decide, measure, standardise: the standard pilot kit, from the first question to the evaluation report.

"Where do we even start?" It is the question we hear most often when presenting the SOLIS bot to a team. The answer is a reusable method: a three-month pilot, with deliverables comparable from one deployment to the next.

Before anything else: one question

Don't start with features. Ask your team, including the staff who talk to beneficiaries every day, this: "When do our beneficiaries most need information, and where is it missing?" Two or three situations will emerge: they define your bot's priority content.

Month 1: setup

Four two-hour workshops take you from need to launch:

  1. Scoping. Objectives, languages, channels (WhatsApp, SMS, voice), data-risk analysis, and above all the grid of numeric targets: the thresholds that will define success (go / no-go for replication), agreed in week one.
  2. Content. The information-center tree (six options per menu at most), two or three template broadcasts, a first questionnaire of ten questions or fewer. Everything written and approved by your teams.
  3. Technical + testing. Configuration (initial hands-on: under an hour), internal tests, then a restricted field broadcast to validate the access assumptions.
  4. Launch. Awareness through community relays, indicators tracked from day one.

Months 2 and 3: operate, then decide

Month two brings the service to life: an active information center, the first mass surveys, weekly usage tracking, including the organic-contact rate, the best proxy for perceived usefulness. Month three measures: a satisfaction survey, consolidated indicators, comparison against the week-one targets, and a documented decision: replicate, adjust, or stop.

Three non-negotiable principles

Data minimisation: collect only what is strictly necessary, with consent, never sensitive data. Complementarity: the bot complements field visits and hotlines, it does not replace them. Comparability: the same indicator definitions from one pilot to the next, so lessons compound.

Ready to launch yours? Write to solisbot@solidarites.org. In an emergency, onboarding takes a matter of hours.

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