Varsha Venugopal

Are you willing to be an ambassador?

So we conducted a pilot study earlier this year for two purposes.

One was to see if a remote version works and the other was to see if ambassadors act.

And the answer to both questions was broadly yes.

So in more than 90% of the cases, when people were contacted randomly, they were able to give us not only the name of an influencer, but also their phone number.

And then in more than 95% of the cases, the influencers agreed to be ambassadors.

The challenge we had was reaching these influencers, possibly because they are influencers.

They're not around most of the times.

It's unfair.

That's just a supposition.

But that's the bit we are now iterating to try and call at different times of the day or different days of the week to get to them.

The other bit was, are these ambassadors then sharing the information?

So one thing we did early on was...

give them a phone number that they could then share with parents and ask the parents to give a missed call to enroll into the SMS Reminders program.

And I think we had more than 30 people sign up in the first week, which again gives us some confidence that the ambassadors are sharing this information and people are receiving it and somehow responding to it.

That's a great question.

So in the J-PAL study, they looked at both trusted people as well as community influencers and see the interaction effects.

And it turns out it is the community influencer bit which seems to be causing the biggest impact.

Other than the fact that we know about 18% of our influencers are women, which is kind of similar to the J-PAL study.

We are very curious to better understand the motivations of the ambassadors and why they take it on.