Answers around the clock, in writing or by voice
Your teams know the scene. The office phone ringing long after closing time. The same questions coming back, a hundred times over, about the next distribution, the number to call, the documents to bring. And the nagging sense that the information exists but never quite reaches the right person at the right moment. The SOLIS bot's information center answers that exact scene: it holds the front desk your teams cannot staff around the clock.
How it works
The principle is simple. A beneficiary sends a WhatsApp message to your number and navigates by numbers through a tree your teams have built. No app, no account, no fees. The golden rule, learned in the field: no more than six options per menu, and only information that is immediately useful.
Here is what a crisis menu looks like, deployed in Lebanon in 2026:
Welcome to the Solidarités International information center. Reply with the number that matches your need. [1] Where to find temporary shelter [2] How to receive emergency food aid [3] How to register with Solidarités [4] Speak directly to the team
Each option can lead to a sub-menu, a contact, a document, or a voice note. You build the tree from a simple web interface, and you change it in a few clicks as the situation evolves.
Designed to be understood by everyone
An information center is only worth as much as its reach to the people conventional channels leave out. So every section exists as text and as a voice note, in the languages your communities speak. In Haiti, the Creole recordings are made by Haitian members of the team, not by a studio voice: a familiar voice, in the accent of the region, is a voice people listen to all the way through. It is a detail that markedly lifts the consultation rate.
Another decisive advantage in low-connectivity settings: PDF documents attached in the bot, illustrated guides or evacuation maps, stay on the beneficiary's phone even without a network. A map consulted offline, on the day coverage drops, can make all the difference.
In practice, three very different contexts
In an emergency. In Lebanon, in March 2026, at the height of the displacement, our teams opened a crisis information center in under 24 hours, to point tens of thousands of people towards shelters and available aid.
In prevention. In Cameroon, the same tool runs a "flood preparedness" center, switched on six weeks before the rainy season, with a checklist, evacuation routes and emergency contacts in French and Fulfulde.
Where access is cut off. In Haiti, in areas teams cannot reach, the information center is sometimes the only active channel, with a deliberately neutral first message so as not to expose the person receiving it.
What it changes
More than 382,000 information messages have been shared to date across all deployments. At CARE Lebanon, 97% of conversations are started spontaneously by beneficiaries, with no broadcast prompting them: the strongest signal that a channel is genuinely useful, and that people come back to it on their own.
Making it last
Three habits separate a living information center from a forgotten one:
- Have the voice notes recorded by your local teams, not by headquarters. The accent and the turns of phrase matter as much as the content.
- Spread your number through the community's trusted channels: local leaders, neighbourhood committees, health workers. One peer recommendation is worth ten posters.
- Plan a quarterly content review. Contacts change, facilities close. A center that is never updated loses its users within months. In a crisis, keeping information fresh is a form of accountability.