Nabad: from 1,500 manual calls to a single click
Operating across Lebanon, including Baalbek-Hermel, Bekaa, Beirut, Mount Lebanon, South Lebanon, and Nabatieh governorates, Nabad for Development manages a sprawling, multi-sectoral network of humanitarian programs. From distributing vital cash, food, and hygiene kits to offering protection, legal assistance, and education, the organization's activities are as diverse as the communities they serve.
With an expansive target footprint of 75,000 beneficiaries, Nabad's Accountability Department faced a massive challenge: how to effectively distribute aid, share critical protection messaging, and collect transparent community feedback without letting administrative bottlenecks paralyze field teams ?
The weight of doing it by hand
As Nabad for Development scaled its multi-sectoral interventions, traditional field operations and community engagement methods began to show some limitations. Organizing a single distribution event for food, cash, or hygiene kits required immense labor. Field officers had to manually dial every single beneficiary, sometimes up to 1,500 people for a single distribution, just to inform them of the date, time, and location, and to manually register their data.
"If you want to call each and every beneficiary, that costs a lot," says Dunia Sakr, Accountability Officer at Nabad.
Simultaneously, sharing vital accountability frameworks, Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (PSEA) guidelines, and general awareness material relied entirely on physical media. Nabad's teams were frequently wondering about the effectiveness of paper flyers distributed during aid drop-offs. Beneficiaries arriving at distribution sites are naturally focused on securing their family's food parcels or kits; they often disregarded the printed materials, treating them as discardable paper.
Nabad needed a communication solution that respected the dignity and time of its beneficiaries, and strengthened its Accountability and Affected Populations (AAP) framework via a sustainable digital platform.
A distribution in one click
As one of the earliest partner adopters of the SOLIS Bot, Nabad for Development shifted its entire outreach strategy from manual tracking to conversational automation. Instead of spending days on the phone trying to reach 1,500 individuals, Nabad's accountability team now crafts automated broadcasts. By using dynamic variables, the team pushes personalized dates, times, locations, and specific distribution details straight to beneficiaries' phones.
"Solis Bot made it easier," Dunia Sakr (Nabad) 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 was increasingly limited.
The end of paper flyers
By digitizing its awareness campaigns, Nabad permanently changed the dynamic of community education. Instead of forcing information onto busy beneficiaries during chaotic distribution events, Nabad uploads PSEA updates, reporting channels, and service mappings directly to the Solis Bot information center.
"Now that it’s accessible on WhatsApp, they can check it whenever they want," Sakr explains. The platform also leverages an audio feature, solving a massive accessibility barrier by allowing individuals with low literacy levels to comfortably interact with the organization and receive critical emergency messages. To drive further adoption, Nabad produced and shared an animated explainer video that walks beneficiaries directly through navigating the bot tree.
A digital competitor to traditional helplines
Initially, Nabad faced community hesitation; it took time for beneficiaries to trust the bot and comfortably submit personal data through a digital portal. However, after consistent exposure, the Solis Bot transformed into one of Nabad's most active feedback channels.
Functioning as a core pillar of Nabad’s multi-channel Feedback, Complaints, and Response Mechanism (FCRM), alongside physical complaint boxes, verbal field reporting, and a traditional helpline, the bot utilizes two straightforward digital forms: one for general assistance requests and another for formal complaints.
Today, the Solis Bot processes an average of 200 feedback entries every month, working as a primary competitive alternative to the traditional telephone hotline. For example, in March 2026, while the hotline managed 277 requests, the Solis Bot seamlessly handled 185, a high-volume shift that Sakr describes as "something huge... shocking and surprising."
Over the ten-month period from July 2025 to May 2026, Nabad pushed 27,448 broadcast messages, the highest broadcast volume of any SOLIS deployment, alongside 49,410 information-center messages and 3,897 completed surveys. At the peak of activities in December 2025, Nabad sent 11,106 broadcasts in that single month to keep beneficiaries informed at the exact moment physical field access was restricted.
Strong ownership and internal department utility
A major reason behind the Solis Bot’s deep integration is Nabad’s structured, internal ownership framework. The system is managed entirely by a dedicated three-person Accountability Department.
To ensure the technology thrives across Nabad's multi-sectoral operations, the accountability team hosts comprehensive one-on-one meetings with all sector-specific Project Managers, introducing them directly to the bot's capabilities. Furthermore, Nabad utilizes the bot internally to support its own staff, providing field workers with an immediate on-the-go repository for internal reporting channels, organizational procedures, and HR policies. Low staff turnover has reinforced institutional knowledge, making SOLIS Bot a deeply embedded part of Nabad's accountability infrastructure.
When asked if she would recommend the platform to other humanitarian teams, Sakr’s conclusion is definitive: “Yes, definitely.”
The financial case
Over ten months, by automating more than 100 000 messages that would each have taken minutes for each to prepare, the bot generated an estimated €160,000 in HR-time value for Nabad, a value-to-cost ratio of roughly 15:1. Every euro Nabad spent on the bot returned approximately 15 euros of staff time that would otherwise have gone into sharing the same information by phone calls, field visits, and paper-based outreach.
While this is not an indicator on costs saved, this is a strong indicator to measure the efficiency of information diffusion: with the same human resources + 10 500€ of SOLIS bot costs, NABAD was able to multiply the reach of data collection and sharing by a factor of 15. For 30 to 60 minutes of daily management, the Accountability team unlocked the equivalent of 4 full-time staff capacity for information sharing. At an estimated €0.12 per beneficiary reached, Nabad runs the most cost-efficient deployment in the entire SOLIS network, and because the license cost is flat, every additional beneficiary drives that figure lower still.
For beneficiaries reaching out, the bot compressed the time to get an answer from an estimated 4.5 hours of travelling and queuing down to about 3 minutes. Across Nabad's caseload, that adds up to over 11,000 days of beneficiary waiting time saved.
When asked about a possible recommendation from the platform to other humanitarian teams, Dunia Sakr's answer is unequivocal: "Yes, definitely."