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Communicating with radio listeners to conduct live polls and send reminders

Farm Radio International (FRI) is an international NGO that harnesses the power of radio to combat poverty and food insecurity in thirty-eight African countries. With its accessible resources and training, FRI helps more than 500 African radio broadcasters produce and deliver practical, relevant, and timely information to tens of millions of local small-scale farmers and their families in rural communities.

Because FRI is committed to understanding farming practices and conditions in thousands of rural communities, they needed an easy and efficient way to conduct polls. Previously, the process for collecting responses was inconsistent among broadcasters and meant purchasing expensive equipment and manually counting missed calls. Because Telerivet is web-based, there's no special equipment or installation required.

Now, Farm Radio uses Telerivet's missed-call polling (or "Beep2vote") service to conduct regional polls: radio broadcasters can easily ask farmers relevant questions over the air and Telerivet automatically gathers and tallies responses. The Beep2vote service is a huge benefit for FRI as it saves not only the organization money but also the listener – they are essentially able to participate for free.

FRI also utilizes Telerivet to alert opt-in listeners via SMS before every show to encourage them to tune in for important programming, news, and information. With Telerivet, FRI is able to store useful listener demographic information, including location, gender, language, listening preferences, their survey responses, and more – all of which help FRI deliver impactful radio programming.

To date, FRI has sent out more than 2000 polls across over 700,000 SMS messages, and gathered more than 1 million listener responses. With Telerivet, FRI has been able to equip more than 200,000 African farmers with mission-critical information and impact thousands of rural African communities.