Felix Rios
According to Internet.org, 85% of the world’s population has access to cellular networks, but just a bit more than 30% has access to the web. Planet Earth is a big place, and 2.8 billion people with access to the internet is a gigantic number, but it leaves roughly 70% out of reach for researchers.
Some more numbers; by the end of 2014 the number of mobile phones is expected to surpass the human population. However, there are two realities hidden in this figure: 1) many people have more than one mobile phone (my case), and 2) only about a quarter of them are smartphones. There is still a very high incidence of feature phones in emerging markets, and access to mobile data is still restricted, limited and expensive for billions of fellow earthlings.
It is in this area that Facebook and Google are grabbing the bull by the horns. These two giants are leading the efforts to reduce the gap between connected and disconnected citizens. Mark Zuckerberg’s company wants to build solar-powered drones that will be flying above areas with no internet connection to provide them with access. Google has a similar approach; their plan is to launch high-altitude balloons that will serve internet connectivity to billions of people without it, using wind and weather patterns to predict flying paths.
But while solar powered drones and flying balloons are getting the next billion people online, what is the Research Industry’s plan to engage them as the next billion participants?
The revolution has already started…
On September 9th, Apple launched a new mobile payment platform that promises to revolutionise mobile payments as we know it. But that revolution has already been going on for a while. In 2007, the same year that Steve Jobs showed the world the very first iPhone, the inhabitants of Kenya started to integrate electronic payments into their daily lives. The equivalent of nearly half of Kenya’s GDP was transferred electronically in 2012. The technology is called Mpesa. You may have never heard of it, but today, it is being used in Kenya, Tanzania, Afghanistan, South Africa, Fiji, DRC, India, Mozambique, Egypt, Lesotho and Rumania. It is a simcard service that does not require data connectivity. Nearly 80% of Kenyan population is using it today to do all kinds of electronic micro transactions.
Carol Realini is the executive chairman of Obopay, a California based mobile payments innovation firm who thinks that Africa is the “Silicon Valley of banking.” According to her, “The future of banking is being defined here…It’s going to change the world.” Mpesa is a great example to show how technology needs to be adapted to make sure it suits every segment of the population. It was crafted out of the limitations and challenges of a market and it made electronic payments a reality at a time when Google and Apple were not even considering mobile payments as a profitable business.
Because mobile payments have been so widely accepted, this has also led to other initiatives. The Gramene Foundation has also developed a platform that doesn’t require data connectivity; instead, all it requires is a GSM signal. It allows farmers in remote areas of Uganda to receive critical information for their living, like draught alerts, weather warnings, even diagnostic and treatments for crop and animal diseases, via SMS.
While Facebook and Google are rethinking how to bring internet access to remote areas, leaving behind the traditional cell towers-cabling approach, it may take them a while to deliver data connectivity to these places. Radical thinking is the fuel behind solar-powered internet-providing airplanes. Mpesa and the Gramene Foundation, are using traditional SIM card services that require no data connectivity to enable millions of people to safely make and receive electronic payments and provide farmers with critical information for their crops. It is this type of radical thinking that we need to repurpose current technologies to reach out to more people.
Should we just wait?
We have two different approaches to this challenge: 1) just wait until internet access in developing economies has enough penetration to allow us to deploy surveys in the ways that we feel familiar with, or 2) Find a way to join these millions of potential participants as they set off down this exciting path. Everything we have learned in the last half decade about mobile participation will allow us to get there.
We think the latter is the correct approach. We have to learn from the Mpesa example and use current and widely adopted technologies in new and more innovative ways. In some markets, users tend to switch off their data throughout the day to stretch their allowance for the entire month (if they have it at all). Many users share internet connection between several households in the community and many use WAP connectivity to access Facebook. While it may become harder to get someone on a mobile device engaged in a single 30-minute session, it may be more engaging to have several short, tweet-like interactions during the day. This means that we have to rethink our “traditional” ways of sending online surveys. If users are only connected for short periods of time, they are not likely to spend this time completing an online survey.
While SMS surveys may be on their way out in some parts of the world due to the prevalence of messaging applications like Whatsapp, Snapchat, Line, etc., it still could be our strongest ally in developing economies. How we link this data in the back end is what will bring this technology to the next level. We have to see beyond the single-session survey and start thinking in terms of “Smart” surveys that use those pockets of spare time throughout the day. SMS as a deployment method can allow participants to check in upon arrival to a place; we can then send surveys adapted to that particular experience and even send reminders to forgetful participants. This, mixed with the wide adoption of electronic payments, is a powerful combination to send surveys and properly incentivize our participants.
In 1982 Neil Papworth sent the very first SMS message, “Merry Christmas,” to an old Orbitel 901 phone. It was meant to be a simple test, but little did he know that it would change communication forever. While the SMS message customer experience still looks the same as that very first message, the back-end technology is far from being frozen in time. Today’s systems allow integration with modern CRM platforms, real-time decision making engines and natural language processing modules, just to mention a few.
Shorter Surveys? LOL
In a recent conversation with an acquaintance from another agency, he laughed when I said that the days of the 30 minute long surveys are numbered. But the reality is that if we want to reach the next billion participants we better have a strategic approach to mobile surveys nailed down. We have to leave behind the topic of device-agnostic surveys, and start thinking about experience-optimized surveys. Our questionnaires need to be able to adapt to one market’s reality and integrate seamlessly with another market’s strengths.
I can hear some people saying that this could mean a jump back in time. The channel that we use to send the surveys is not what is important; it’s the technology that amalgamates all the different sources of data that’s important. If the centre of the debate is the need of mobile devices with a data connection to receive online surveys, we are seeing technology as the destination. Instead, we need to look at it as the way. The key here is not how you send the surveys, but how platforms will allow us to aggregate and draw insights from SMS surveys from some markets, online survey data from other markets, non structured data from wearable devices and behavioural data from smart home devices. Otherwise, we haven’t moved much from old-school pen-and-paper surveys.
Five characteristics of the next billion participants:
- They skipped two whole technologies: “I need a computer to connect to the internet” and “I need a landline to have a phone”.
- They are mobile in nature and embody the true sense of the mobile participant. Because they are mobile natives, they are used to short and quick interactions with digital content.
- For them, the mobile device is not a recreational/fashion gadget; it is not one more way to be connected, but is instead the only way.
- Many of these users will not have internet at home and will not have an internet-enabled mobile device.
- Many of these users will have data connectivity in their phones, but will not have WiFi at home.
Felix Rios is Market Research Technology Manager at Ugam
