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Using Mobile Airtime Credits to Incentivize Learning, Sharing and Survey Response: Experiences from the Field

Published: 01 July 2020 Publication History

Abstract

In the Global South, mobile airtime payment has emerged as a popular way to incentivize different research studies, including ones on survey completion or disseminating information to people. Building on this literature, we report deployment experiences from three different studies in India that used airtime incentives. The first was used to promote awareness about HIV/AIDS, the second for promoting awareness and surveying preparedness for an upcoming election, and the third to measure learning and encourage people to vote in a conflict-hit region for a different election. Unlike past work, we found that a delivery mechanism that focuses on asking questions first, rather than presenting a tutorial and then asking questions, worked well in practice. In addition, we found multiple challenges in adoption of the technology and tried different ways to incentivize peer sharing of our system. Between the three deployments, we also addressed other technical and human-centered challenges such as delayed airtime payments and people using the system on behalf of someone else. We hope that our experiences and insights can be helpful to others seeking to deploy applications that utilize mobile airtime payments for learning, sharing, and survey response.

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  • (2024)Toward a Measure of Collective Digital Capacity: An Exploratory AnalysisExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650811(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2021)A Hybrid Multi-Modal System for Conducting Virtual Workshops Using Interactive Voice Response and the WhatsApp Business APIExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3451820(1-6)Online publication date: 8-May-2021

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  1. Using Mobile Airtime Credits to Incentivize Learning, Sharing and Survey Response: Experiences from the Field

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    COMPASS '20: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies
    June 2020
    359 pages
    ISBN:9781450371292
    DOI:10.1145/3378393
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 01 July 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. HCI4D
    2. ICTD
    3. India
    4. financial incentives
    5. survey response

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    • (2024)Toward a Measure of Collective Digital Capacity: An Exploratory AnalysisExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650811(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2021)A Hybrid Multi-Modal System for Conducting Virtual Workshops Using Interactive Voice Response and the WhatsApp Business APIExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3451820(1-6)Online publication date: 8-May-2021

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