Tell powerful stories with chatbots

Cute waving robot

We're beginning to see more chatbots on websites - these are programmed chat interactions which often combine structured questions and answers and natural language processing in order to provide a useful experience for site visitors.

Chatbots can pick up common questions and save organisations and individuals time in communicating or finding common answers. They can also drive conversations and help communicate organisational narratives - for example, charities may find it difficult to explain to donors how useful their work is. Case studies and videos can help here but conversations can be appealing and this is where chatbots can play a part.

There are a number of proprietary systems for creating chatbots. Many of these are free but there are no guarantees that youtr platform won't start charging or even that it'll still be around in a couple of years. So it's timely that Drupal's chatbot module was one of the topics highlighted at the recent DrupalCon in Baltimore. The module was released by the Whitehouse under the previous Obama administration and is freely available for use for Drupal. You can create your chatbot and tell your charity story while keeping your content and code safely on your Drupal site. As always with Drupal open source software, this means no ongoing proprietary licensing fees. The module works alongside Facebook's ubiquitous Messenger app so conversations can be integrated into any desktop and mobile experience. Tell your charity's story - show how people use and benefit from the work you do. Use chatbots to engage with your service users or donors. I don't see chatbots currently offering a replacement to other media in this domain but I do see them as another useful tool in helping charities to better explain the work they do and win over new audiences. A really good example in the charity domain is the Cyrenians' Alex.

What other uses are there for chatbots for charities? If you know of any other good examples, please let me know.

Update: There's a new chatbot module (chatbot_api) that seeks to enable integration with multiple third party services so your chatbot content can appear in multiple integrations such as Amazon Echo & Alexa, Google Home, Facebook.