In the face of uncertain budgets and growing global challenges, humanitarian organizations are being forced to do more with less.
But amid the pressure, there’s opportunity - to rethink how we communicate, how we reach people, and how we deliver impact at scale.
In this Telerivet piece, we explore how organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières, the Norwegian Refugee Council, New Incentives, and Farm Radio International are using Telerivet to build smarter, more efficient communication systems - from SMS reminders to airtime transfers, mass surveys, and beyond.
We’ll cover:
- Now is the time of efficiencies
- How do humanitarian organizations handle communication?
- How the Norwegian Refugee Council scaled outreach through digital hubs
- How New Incentives uses airtime transfers to enable cost-effective field communication at scale
- How Médecins Sans Frontières automated SMS reminders to increase HIV testing and appointment attendance
- How Farm Radio International uses missed calls to get feedback from farmers
Now is the time of efficiencies
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born”
Unfortunately, the funding situation for NGOs and humanitarian organizations around the world has been thrown into uncertainty in recent months, with the changing policy directions of the United States government.
"Uncertainty" is maybe not doing the issue justice.
Many charities, NGOs, and humanitarian organizations are already aware that their budgets are going to be deeply slashed by the cuts to USAID.
The reverberation of these cuts will be felt around the world. The impact will be seen on the ground - where aid matters most.
In the ability to provide services and resources to many of the people around the world who need it most.
But the impact and effects will also be seen in Western nations, where charities, NGOs, and humanitarian organizations are going to face reduced budgets and potentially job cuts, downsizing, or shuttering completely.
This is a potentially highly damaging blow to the third sector worldwide.
There isn’t an easy answer for how organizations can deal with this. There’s no one trick that doctors don’t want you to know for dealing with a budget shortfall.
The best we can do is try to find efficiencies where we can - so that we can extend those budgets, continue to deliver the impacts and services that we across the industry provide, and extend the timelines through which we can source alternative funding channels and new opportunities to access funds or support to help keep things going.
There are many people in this sector for whom it’s no new experience to have to deal with small budgets.
That said, there is space to be more ruthlessly efficient - and in this article, we’ll explore a couple of tips within our domain of expertise on how you can do just that.
How do humanitarian organizations handle communication?
Humanitarian organizations around the world handle communication in many different ways. There’s no industry standard, nor one single industry playbook. In humanitarian work, you're often needed precisely because the situation is unorthodox.
When choosing a provider for humanitarian communication, lots of charities, NGOs, and humanitarian organizations choose one of the big brands. This can sometimes be a wise decision. But now might be a good time for these organizations to look outside of simply the biggest brands. Among communications platforms, many of the biggest firms are not the cheapest, nor best value. By opting to work with them, organizations often enter into a closed garden, where some services (such as SMS rates) may be priced rather high, and plugging in lower-cost connectivity providers may not be possible.
It’s why we built Telerivet to allow plugging in connectivity providers of all different types - so that you can find the best deals across different providers, and use different providers depending on the country you work in, while still managing communication from one common user interface.
How the Norwegian Refugee Council scaled outreach through digital hubs
The Norwegian Refugee Council came to us at Telerivet during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was facing a similar type of shock to what we're seeing across the industry now.
The pandemic changed the circumstances of aid - and required new solutions. What NRC needed was a way to scale its delivery and reach through digital means.
To do this, the Norwegian Refugee Council partnered with a range of technology providers, including Telerivet, to create what they called digital community hubs (DCH).
These hubs were designed to use digital communication to reach larger numbers of people - to be able to understand needs, and, where possible, deliver services and support to vulnerable people in a very difficult period of time to be a refugee. These hubs also served to make aid delivery less reliant on physical infrastructure and in-person contact.
By implementing digital community hubs, NRC was able to operate at larger scales - more efficiently - than it had been able to before, significantly reducing expenses related to travel, assessments, and staffing.
In 2023, NRC reached over 465,000 people in less than a month with a small team using the digital community hub's technology. Achieving this level of reach previously would have required adding hundreds or even thousands of staff members.
How New Incentives uses airtime transfers to enable cost-effective field communication at scale
New Incentives is a nonprofit in Nigeria that works alongside state governments and partners to increase the rates of childhood vaccinations and reduce childhood mortality.
New Incentives provides cash incentives to caregivers at government clinics after children receive various vaccinations for diseases such as tuberculosis, polio, hepatitis B, and measles. The cash incentives to mothers total up to ₦11,000 (approximately $7), helping the caregivers cover transportation costs and lost income. Field staff are responsible for enrolling caregivers, verifying that infants have received vaccines, and disbursing cash incentives.
New Incentives leverages technology in interesting ways to implement their mission, enabling them to reach a large number of caregivers and infants at very low costs. Including all of New Incentives' expenses, the total cost has decreased to about $17 per infant as they have scaled the program across northern Nigeria.
Although New Incentives disburses the cash incentives outside of Telerivet, New Incentives uses Telerivet's airtime transfer feature extensively to support the work devices of over 2,900 staff across Nigeria.
New Incentives has used Telerivet since 2016 to send airtime credits to work devices assigned to field workers. For workers on prepaid mobile plans, sending airtime credits is a simple way to ensure their work phones remain functional, without requiring them to use personal funds. Workers can then use the airtime credits for job-related data submission as well as communication, including phone calls and SMS messaging.
After Telerivet added the ability to send data bundles in 2024, New Incentives also began using Telerivet to send data bundles to work devices, providing mobile data at a lower cost than using airtime credits directly. This enables field workers to access New Incentives’ digital systems without paying out of pocket.
Sending airtime and bundles to field workers is easy, since New Incentives only needs each worker's phone number. After importing the workers' phone numbers into Telerivet, New Incentives' global team can quickly select large groups of workers and disburse airtime or bundles automatically, reducing the time needed to process disbursements.
The results of New Incentives' program have been significant, enabling New Incentives to scale from enrolling 14,000 infants in 2017 to enrolling over 1.7 million infants in 2024 alone. According to GiveWell, New Incentives’ model is “one of the most cost-effective ways we’ve found to save a life.”
How Médecins Sans Frontières automated SMS reminders to increase HIV testing and appointment attendance
Médecins Sans Frontières - or Doctors Without Borders, as they’re known in English-speaking countries -came to Telerivet with the goal of increasing HIV self-testing and appointment attendance in Cape Town, South Africa, through sending reminders and follow-up messages.
To deliver reminders, MSF used automated SMS to deliver this communication via a reverse-billed shortcode, which ensures that participants would not be charged if they send SMS replies.
Compared to other MSF programs to ensure reporting of testing and treatment, reverse-billed SMS interactions with participants has produced much higher response rates than app-based systems, paper-based referral cards, or phone calls. MSF found that the sooner the participants received an SMS, the more likely they were to report a result.
By automating SMS notifications and reminders, MSF also avoided needing someone on their staff to call or text each of the participants to give reminders. In general, as the number of beneficiaries increases, automating reminders and other messages becomes more and more cost-effective for humanitarian organizations compared the alternative of having someone on staff manually communicate with each beneficiary.
How Farm Radio International uses missed calls to get feedback from farmers
The final communication practice we'll touch on is the use of polling for data collection by leveraging missed calls.
Across 38 African countries, Farm Radio International partners with local radio stations to ensure that practical, relevant, and timely information reaches tens of millions of small-scale farmers in rural communities.
They wanted to deploy a method of interaction that would provide two-way communication between radio stations and the farmers who listen to the radio — and do so in a way that was affordable for the organization and didn’t incur a charge to the farmers, who would otherwise not have been able to afford to participate in the process.
The way Farm Radio International reached the farmers was by partnering with Telerivet to deploy a simple system, where the radio host would ask a question — and ask listeners to "vote" by calling in to one of two or more phone numbers. When a listener calls, the call never connects, and it hangs up immediately. To determine how many votes each option received, Telerivet counts the total number of callers to each of the phone numbers.
Since the call doesn’t go through, the listener isn’t charged, making this an accessible way to participate. At the same time, it keeps costs low for the organization conducting the poll, since the organization also isn't charged for missed calls. This makes it an affordable and effective way to increase engagement in communities where money is already tight.
This allowed the radio stations supported by Farm Radio International to communicate in real time, in a two-way process, with a large number of smallholder farmers across different regions in Africa.
This increased communication helped to uncover the challenges and pains these farmers were facing in their everyday labor.
And in doing so, they were better able to deploy the resources at their disposal to meet the diverse needs of the smallholder farmers.
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