Monitor and evaluate

Once your Freedom Fone service is up and running, it is important to keep a finger on the pulse of your service and to periodically monitor its success and impact. Freedom Fone has some inbuilt tools that can be used to track caller usage of your service. In the chapter Organise your staff, we make some recommendations about assigning the task of monitoring and analysing your system data.

Ways to monitor and evaluate your service:

• Focus group discussions: Arrange to visit communities where your audience is based and are prepared to talk about your service. This face-to-face communication can not only help you evaluate your service but also provide you with new ideas!
• SMS polls: You might like to try polling your audience with a simple closed question, such as "Have you found our content useful?". This could be sent out to callers by making a voice menu explaining how to vote, sent as a bulk SMS to a list of numbers or by using one of your advertising channels.
• Competition: You might start a competition, asking your callers to submit their ideas for content, with a small prize for those interesting contributions which are implemented
• Call data records (CDR): Freedom Fone keeps track of usage statistics on all incoming calls and SMSs (see chapter on Statistics in section: "Setting up").
• Number of callers - You might map the number of calls at the beginning of your campaign and watch to see if they grow, you should notice peaks and troughs around advertising and education campaigns, new content, polls and competitions.
• Length of calls - how long your callers are staying on the line? This may indicate that your content is too long (and therefore too expensive), or not engaging enough, or technical errors and a misunderstanding of how to use the menus may also be indicated.
• Popular content - which content your callers are accessing, which may help identify which information they consider more useful and relevant. Contacting one-off callers might be helpful in identifying which barriers prevented them from accessing your service again.
• SMS poll statistics - will show how many callers participated in your poll, and the number of invalid votes will help you evaluate how successful your caller education campaign has been.
• Phone surveys: Once you have extracted and analysed your CDR stats you can create two lists of groups of audience members to survey through a simple phone call:
• Top 20 callers: These are your regular customers. Try sending them an SMS and ask them if they are willing to participate in an audience survey. You can then prepare a short survey to be conducted over the phone - this will help you evaluate and refine your service, especially focusing on what people like about your service.
• One time callers: It is just as important to also contact people who are not using your service regularily - they only called your system once and never called back. Surveying them can help you find out how to improve your service and remove barriers to its use.