Thousands of people alerted in seconds
A distribution is being organised. Every beneficiary has to be told the date, the time, the location, the documents to bring. Multiplied by several hundred people, that means entire days of phone calls, and even then, some arrive in the wrong place, or not at all. The SOLIS bot's broadcasting replaces those days on the phone with a single send, and turns a logistical chore into a two-minute operation.
How it works
The power of broadcasting lies in personalisation. You do not send a generic message, but each person's own, thanks to variables. Preparation takes three steps:
- You prepare a file with your beneficiaries: phone, first name, site, date and time slot.
- You import it into the bot, which maps each column to a variable.
- You write a single template with the tags
[first_name],[site],[date],[time].
Each person then receives a message that looks written for them:
SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL Hello Fatima, your food distribution is scheduled for Thursday 12 December at 9:00 at the Tripoli North distribution point. You will receive a hygiene kit and one month of food supplies. Please bring your SI card and your ID. Reply 1 to confirm your attendance.
The default channel is WhatsApp, at €0.02 per message. An SMS fallback reaches phones without internet, and a voice version reaches people who cannot read.
The detail that saves an emergency
Broadcast templates must be approved by WhatsApp before any send, a process that can take 48 hours. In a live crisis, 48 hours is often too late. The best practice, proven in Cameroon, is to prepare and approve critical messages before the crisis: the flood-alert templates there are approved as early as April, six weeks ahead of the rainy season, ready to fire the moment the weather threshold is crossed.
In practice
Easing the logistics. At Nabad, in Lebanon, organising a distribution meant calling up to 1,500 people one by one. Replacing those calls with one broadcast represents 75 to 125 staff-hours saved per event, or 9 to 16 working days of a field officer's time recovered.
Holding the link when everything tips over. In December 2025, at the peak of the violence, Nabad sent 11,106 broadcasts in a single month, at the exact moment physical field access collapsed. Over ten months, the total reaches 27,448 messages, the highest volume in the network.
What it changes
What used to take two days takes two minutes, and you keep control of all of it. From the dashboard, you track messages delivered in real time, with 95% reach in Lebanon, read rates and replies received. Every campaign is archived and sharpens the next one.
For a broadcast that lands
- Target precisely. A message sent to the right group, by area or by programme, beats a mass blast. You avoid wasted sends and you protect trust.
- Test before you send. First send the broadcast to five team members, check the formatting, the links and the translation. Thirty minutes of testing avoids a lot of surprises.
- Build trust in advance. A number communities have already used, and trust, will be ten times more effective on the day of the emergency. Communicate regularly, even outside a crisis.