Radio is the world's most powerful broadcast platform that unites communities. Despite global evolution of communications technologies, radio reaches more places and people than any other. It is estimated that 3 billion people listen to the radio on a weekly basis. And, though it often doesn’t get much credit for it, radio is also a source of innovation. Radio stations all over the world are building new formats, reporting groundbreaking stories, and using technology to engage hard-to-reach people in critical public conversations. And, some of them are using FrontlineSMS+Radio – a unique combination of the world's farthest-reaching two-way engagement platform and the world's furthest reaching broadcasting tool.
South Sudan’s Sawa Shabab (Together Youth) is one of many radio stations that has used FrontlineSMS to provide entertainment, host community dialogue, and support targeted educational messages. The show recounts the lives of young people in South Sudan and their struggles, dreams, and thought processes. At the end of the show, the characters ask questions to the audience and invite them to submit their answers via SMS, with automatic responses in English, Dinka or Nuer. Since its establishment, Sawa Shabab has received 10,000 calls and texts, while 62% of the population under its broadcast has heard of it, according to a survey conducted by PeaceTech Lab. It uses FrontlineSMS to engage its users, get responses to questions asked during their show, and promote peace-building through a weekly scripted drama. A study conducted by Forcier Consulting shows that 99% of Sawa Shabab’s listeners liked the broadcast, while active female listeners grew to 62% from 40%, highlighting that good engagement not only grows audiences, it grows impact.
Sawa Shabab uses FrontlineSMS’s activities to create unique questions and polls, based on the issues facing the characters or the needs of the program. Frontline automates each interaction, looking just like a normal text message conversation to an end-user. To the Sawa Shabab team, though, Frontline is visualizing the results and response rates of each poll question in custom dashboards, building a database of participants for future outreach and engagement, and, most importantly, converting conversations into usable, actionable data for real-time and future programming.
Introduced locally by Free Voice South Sudan in collaboration with United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in 2014, Sawa Shabab also promotes peace and stability by empowering youth to be confident, open-minded, and participatory citizens in a diverse society. Still, radio has limits. It requires listeners to be engaged at a fixed time, hosts are limited by airtime, and stations can be bound by limited revenue and listener proximity.
FrontlineSMS has made on-air engagement manageable. The platform has helped radio managers to configure, update and manage their SMS interactions. Frontline’s Activities make it easy to automate listener opt-in and subscriptions, The Radio Activities lets the listeners register, request songs, respond to surveys and participate in competitions.
There are countless relays across multiple spectrums vying for every precious moment of airtime during a normal radio broadcast. Radio stations and DJs are leading the way in multi-platform engagement, using FrontlineSMS to take on climate change advocacy, coordinate responses during emergencies, amplify voices for peace during conflict, and bring communities together.
Sawa Shabab uses FrontlineSMS+Radio to get a better grasp on who are listening and promote long term growth and communication with their dedicated following, as having one-to-many interactions with listeners becomes quick and easy. Radio gives you a megaphone so the people can hear you, but FrontlineSMS gives you the ability to listen, understand, and respond.
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