Challenge

India crowdfunding platform needs effective way to engage donors

Milaap is South Asia’s largest crowdfunding platform for personal causes and healthcare emergencies.

The platform is transforming the way India gives to those in need, allowing anyone to create a fundraiser for free and benefit from campaign management tools to promote their project.

Getting campaign messages to Milaap’s community of donors – 60% of which is based in India – is key to securing donations and informing donors about the fundraising causes they support.

But with relatively low delivery and open rates for SMS and email, Milaap needed a more effective way to engage donors, drive traffic to the platform, and help increase donations.

To achieve this goal, the crowdfunding platform needed a digital messaging solution that enables fast, secure, two-way communication over a digital channel with wide consumer adoption in India.

Solution

WhatsApp Business Platform brings efficiency and interactivity to donor messaging

WhatsApp is the fastest growing channel in India. What’s more, Milaap fundraising projects typically receive twice the amount of donations when they’re shared amongst donors’ friends and family via WhatsApp.

Powered by Infobip, WhatsApp Business Platform was therefore an ideal choice for Milaap, and provided a multitude of benefits:

• Engaging experiences: WhatsApp enables real-time rich notifications, featuring the likes of video, images, and downloadable content, as well as two-way, customer-initiated conversations.
• A trusted channel: WhatsApp Business is a widely adopted and trusted channel in India. Easy onboarding and verification codes provide a reliable verification system using two-way communication.
• Secure donations: the channel integrates with major payment gateways for a secure and seamless donation journey.
• Efficiency gains: conversation flows and templates, for the likes of onboarding newly registered users, bring efficiency and automation to campaign management.

We used the Infobip WhatsApp Business Platform to design a customized communication tailored to Milaap’s requirements and use cases.

These use cases including facilitating key activities and tasks across the donor user journey, such as:

• Onboarding: easy onboarding using automated welcome messages.
• Making a donation: enabling donors to make secure donations with confidence.
• Getting real-time alerts: giving donors real-time alerts, including donation receipts.
• Getting ongoing campaign content: updating donors on the campaigns they support, with rich media content and downloads.
• Sharing campaigns: making it easy for donors to extend the reach of fundraising campaigns by sharing information with friends and family via WhatsApp.
• Asking a question: enabling customer-initiated, two-way conversations.

Results

New messaging solution drives uplift in engagement and volume of donations

It’s still early days, but the WhatsApp solution is driving a clear uplift in user engagement, click-through rates, and gross dollar volume (GDV) payments.

The ease with which donors can share campaigns amongst friends and family means that WhatsApp now drives a quarter of all traffic to the Milaap platform.