The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Ethiopia’s Integrated Youth Activity (IYA) – Kefeta developed Finding Success Online (FSO), a free chat app based training program focused on helping young people find professional, and personal, success online through digital literacy. IYA – Kefeta is a five-year Activity aiming to benefit at least two million Ethiopian young people across 18 Ethiopian cities.
Consortium partners, Amref Health Africa and the International Youth Foundation, developed the Finding Success Online (FSO) training using TextIt, Telegram, and Zapier and built out 14 interactive micro lessons. Modules include Your Digital Reputation, Social Media & Your Wellbeing, Communicating Online, Social Media Bubbles, Job Portal Tips and Tricks, Managing Misinformation, Creating Your Own Content, and more.
🗺️ Navigation menus - Using multiple flows with assigned keyword triggers, learners can move between the main menu, help menu, points menu, and each individual lesson.
🎮 Gamification - Learners earn points with every question answered correctly and every lesson completed. The points are collected and tallied up using expressions in the flow. At the end of each module, the points are saved as a contact field.
😀 Emojis - The course takes advantage of emojis to emphasize important points, break up text heavy sections, and bring levity to the material.
🫵🏽 Daily nudge reminders - Using the Campaigns feature in TextIt, the FSO bot sends learners daily reminders for two weeks after their registration date.
🫧 Buttons - Chat apps like Telegram and WhatsApp allow you to send response options, called Quick Replies, that appear as buttons on the contact’s end. A learner can either type the response or tap the button.
🖼️ Attachments - Using media in messages adds interest to keep contacts engaged. SMS & chat app channels on TextIt can be used to send rich media, including audio, video & image attachments.
🔤 Language translations - TextIt allows for multi-language flow building. When a new learner first interacts with the bot, a language preference is requested and saved in the contact’s details.
🏆 Completion certificate - After successfully completing 6 or more training modules, learners can receive a customized certificate PDF acknowledging their hard work. The FSO bot uses an integration between TextIt and Zapier to achieve this. Keep reading to see how.
After an initial registration flow, learners are brought to the main menu where they can select from among the various training modules. They can be taken in any order. We took the Digital Reputation lesson.
Here’s how that looked on Telegram from the learner’s perspective:
And here’s how the same message was composed in a flow on TextIt:
Zapier allows anyone to integrate with over 1000 other apps like Google Sheets, Slack, and Salesforce without writing a single line of code. Specifically, it enables you to create connections that pass information from one app to another.
The FSO bot uses a tailored integration between TextIt, Google Sheets, Google Slides & Zapier’s URL shortener to generate completion certificates after finishing 6 or more training modules.
A new flow event is created in TextIt based on learners completing a defined number of lessons. The flow congratulates the learner on their achievement and prompts them to enter information needed for the certificate 
A new row is added to a Google Sheets document. This step allows IYA to visualize the data being passed from TextIt and better track every new certificate generated.
A customized certificate URL is created from a template developed by the IYA - Kefeta team in Google Slides.
The URL is shortened in Zapier. This step was added as a work-around for a tricky formatting issue on Telegram.
A flow is started in TextIt. This is where the URL is sent to the contact to download their completion certificate as a PDF.
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