Chose your Own SMS Adventure with CiviCRM

[ UUID ] 74708e36-c833-43c0-b080-82b1ddd4d8ae

[ Session Name ] Chose your Own SMS Adventure with CiviCRM [ Primary Space ] Digital Inclusion [ Secondary Space ] Decentralisation

[ Submitter's Name ] Nic Wistreich [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] CiviCRM / Visuali.st [ Submitter's GitHub ] @vingle

[ Other Facilitator 1's Name ] Michael McAndrew [ Other Facilitator 1's GitHub ] @3sd

[ Other Facilitator 2's Name ] Rose Lannigan

What will happen in your session?

Participants will build their own SMS-based ‘choose your own adventure’ app using the open source CiviCRM — learning how to interact with people with limited or no web access. Using Civi’s SMS Conversation extension (originally funded by the National Democratic Institute), on a number of pre-configured CiviCRM setups, participants will work with user records and SMS providers, recording answers in the CRM, and delivering a small SMS game that works entirely over mobile phones. The principles could be used to automate support, info-services or even a pub quiz. If time allows we’ll try making a Facebook chatbot with it too.

What is the goal or outcome of your session?

There will be a tangible working SMS-only quiz created by each participant (or group of participants), which will be playable for the remainder of the festival (up to a cap of pre-paid SMS fees). We hope to have introduced some basic if/then/else conditional logic and illustrated how easily SMS and web services can integrate. We want to help participants understand how, without coding skills and just a few bucks for the SMS service, they can create and automate interactive communication with people who don’t have web access or prefer SMS. At the end users will also have experiences of the popular open source CiviCRM— showcasing how much is possible with decentralised, free and open source tools.

If your session requires additional materials or electronic equipment, please outline your needs.

A projector. Spare laptops might be useful for those without their own if this is normal? Otherwise there will be a small cost related to the SMS service, £10-50, depending on how popular the games are — but maybe we can find someone to sponsor/pay for this.

Time needed

60 mins