Technology Volunteerism For Social Good; How We Made Frontline Easier To Use

Alex Pitkin | Frontline | December 23, 2014

At Frontline, we believe that partnership and collaboration best help us drive positive social change. Today I’m delighted to share how our partnership with SocialCoding4Good, an initiative of Benetech, has resulted in great improvement to the FrontlineSMS contact search and selection capability, using our newly released Multi Selector tool. See the demo of the multi selector to see how it works.

The Multi Selector is an entirely open source project that has been built flexibly so as not to be only useful in limited areas; we hope it will be picked up and used in many other applications.  To better understand the significance of this release, consider the story of Pakistani civil society organization Strengthening Participatory Organization (SPO).

In 2011, SPO used FrontlineSMS to implement a disaster relief project following monsoon flooding in Sindh, Pakistan’s southernmost province. The flooding affected an estimated 5.5 million people who faced lack of clean drinking water, food, healthcare, and shelter, which, in turn, resulted in communicable and non-communicable diseases across the province, destruction of agricultural land and livestock, and a loss of livelihoods...