Whatsapp integration

Purpose

Being able to communicate to your beneficiaries through Whatsapp is very powerful in many scenarios of field work. It can be used to provide reminders for important events or your field-worker's visit. You can provide nudges for those who need to be follow a routine.

Use cases

Remind everyone in a village about an upcoming Village Health and Nutrition Day (VHND)
Remind pregnant mothers about an upcoming ANC visit
Send motivational videos to all users enrolled into a de addiction programme
Inform a student about an upcoming interview
Remind a teacher and their principal about an observation session the next day
Remind field-workers to submit their monthly reports

How it works

Avni uses Glific to send Whatsapp messages to beneficiaries and users. Glific is not just a way to connect to Whatsapp. It also provides rich communication between beneficiaries through chatbots. Glific also provides a neat way for two-way communication between beneficiaries.

If an organisation uses Avni, a lot of information about the user is available in Avni. More importantly, Avni also understands when an important event has either happened, or is about to happen. Due to this reason, Avni is well-placed to provide reminders and nudges where they are necessary. Avni-Glific integration has three pieces.

Sending of a message on a trigger. Triggers can be registration of a user, enrolment into a program or completion of a visit. When such a trigger happens, Avni can send a message to Glific at a scheduled time.
Bulk send of messages for a group of users. Sometimes, the organisation needs to share a piece of information to their entire set of beneficiaries, or a sub-group within it. This can be done through a web-based mechanism
Sending of messages to an individual and viewing sent messages on the Avni field-app

PS: Interested organisations must create an account in Glific and configure Glific in Avni in order to use this functionality

Sending messages on a trigger

In the application designer, there is an option within subject types, programs and encounter types to provide

A schedule rule that specifies the time in which the message needs to be sent (once the event is triggered)
A message rule that helps figure out the parameters required for the message

The messages are scheduled when the event is synced to the server (or at save if you are using the Data Entry Application).

Setup

First, you need to enable messaging in the Organisation Settings on the Admin page

Next, provide details to connect to Glific into the external_api table. This currently does not have a UI. Entries need to be made in the format.

insert into external_system_config(organisation_id, version, created_by_id, last_modified_by_id, created_date_time, last_modified_date_time, system_name, config) values (2, 1, 1, 1, now(), now(), 'Glific', '{"baseUrl": "API URI field value from password manager", "phone": "Login for API field value from password manager", "password": "Password field value from password manager", "avniSystemUser": "[email protected]"}'::jsonb);

Ensure that atleast one of your form fields is marked as a phone number. This can be done by going to a text concept, and marking its "contact_number" value to "yes".

Once this configuration is complete, go over to the App Designer and create rules to send messages.

There are 2 rules to be configured here. The first determines the time when the message needs to be sent. The second gives the parameters on the message. These parameters can be fetched from any part of the entity. The message rule should return the computed array of parameters for this entity.

You can choose to send the message to either the subject/beneficiary or the user who made the entry.

You can also have multiple rules defined for the same trigger. In this case, you can have a message to be sent immediately, and another to be sent after a week.

Bulk send of messages for a group of users

Under Broadcast section of the Avni web application, you will now see a new option - WhatsApp. This can be used to send messages to beneficiaries, users or groups.

Check this video out, to know how to manage groups and send messages to groups.

Currently only name of the subject/user is supported as dynamic parameter. To use this, enter @name in the parameter input field.

Limitations

Currently, only HSM messages is in scope of this integration. Eventually, the integration will also include triggering workflows in Glific.