Nabad: from 1,500 manual calls to a single click
Nabad for Development covers an enormous stretch of Lebanon, from Baalbek-El Hermel to the Bekaa, from Beirut to Mount Lebanon, from the South to Nabatieh. Its programmes are just as broad: cash, food and hygiene kits, protection, legal aid, education. With a target of 75,000 beneficiaries, the organisation faced a very concrete question. How do you distribute aid, share protection messaging and gather community feedback without administrative logistics grinding the field teams to a halt?
The weight of doing it by hand
As Nabad scaled up its work, traditional methods hit a wall. Organising a single distribution of food or kits took an enormous amount of labour. Field officers had to call each beneficiary individually, sometimes up to 1,500 people for one event, simply to announce the date, time and location, then register everyone's details by hand.
"If you want to call each and every beneficiary, that costs a lot," says Dunia Sakr, Accountability Officer at Nabad.
Awareness-raising, meanwhile, ran entirely on paper. Guidance on preventing abuse, accountability frameworks and key messages travelled as printed flyers handed out at distribution sites. Yet someone collecting a parcel for their family is focused on that parcel, not on a sheet of paper they will pocket and forget. Nabad needed a channel that respected the attention and dignity of its beneficiaries, eased the logistics, and centralised its accountability framework on a durable platform.
A distribution in one click
As one of the earliest partners to adopt the SOLIS bot, Nabad shifted its outreach strategy from manual tracking to conversational automation. Instead of spending days on the phone, the accountability team now composes personalised broadcasts. With dynamic variables, each beneficiary receives their date, time, location and the details that concern them, straight to their phone.
"Solis Bot made it easier," Sakr confirms. The team moved from an exhausting loop of individual calls to coordinating logistics, in her words, "with just one click."
The saving is measurable: replacing 1,500 calls with one broadcast recovers 75 to 125 staff-hours per distribution, or 9 to 16 working days of a field officer's time at every event. Over ten months, Nabad pushed 27,448 broadcasts, the highest volume anywhere in the SOLIS network. In December 2025, at the peak of the violence, 11,106 messages went out in a single month, at the exact moment physical field access collapsed.
The end of paper flyers
By digitising its awareness campaigns, Nabad changed the very nature of the relationship. Updates on preventing abuse, reporting channels and service mappings now live in the information center, available at any time. The audio feature removes the literacy barrier, letting people who are less comfortable with text receive and understand critical messages. To support adoption, the organisation even produced a short animated video that walks beneficiaries through navigating the bot.
A complaints channel that earned its place
At first, the community hesitated. It took time for beneficiaries to trust the channel and to share personal information through it. Then the bot became one of Nabad's most active feedback channels. Woven into the complaints mechanism alongside physical boxes, verbal reporting and the traditional hotline, it now handles an average of 200 entries a month. In March 2026, where the hotline managed 277 requests, the bot handled 185, a shift the team calls "remarkable."
The bottom line
Nabad records 33,117 unique users, the network record, and a cost of roughly €0.12 per beneficiary reached, the lowest anywhere in the SOLIS network. Every euro spent on the bot returned around fifteen euros of staff time, the time that would otherwise have gone into calls and field visits. And because the licence is a flat fee, every additional beneficiary drives that cost lower still. Would she recommend the platform to other humanitarian teams? Dunia Sakr's answer is unequivocal: "Yes, definitely."