DreamSave Messages Can Replace Passbooks
The DreamSave app helps savings groups grow faster by making it easy to keep records, achieve financial goals, and build credit history. But DreamSave was also designed to send SMS receipts and notifications to alert members about any changes to their group policies, member profiles, and financial transactions. This makes DreamSave a digital tool which can replace savings group members’ paper passbooks.
If you are interested in a DreamSave pilot, we put together a detailed guide about how DreamSave handles SMS, including how many messages groups can expect to receive each month which may factor into your or the group’s budget. At the bottom of this article, you will find an editable spreadsheet that may help you to customize details of your groups to estimate the number of expected SMS messages.
What SMS messages should groups expect to receive?
Typically, DreamSave sends 4 categories of SMS messages during the cycle:
- Meeting Summaries: These are sent to each member who registered a phone number in the group. They contain group-level information but also data specific to each member.
- Transaction Receipts: These are sent to each member of the group.
- Behavioral Nudges (Loan Reminders, Savings Nudges, etc.): These are sent occasionally to nudge a certain number of people in a group.
- Security Notifications (Constitution Changes, Passcode Recovery, etc.): These are triggered to notify the member of a change that requires particular attention.
Note that these SMS messages are only sent to members who have added a phone number to their profile. Messages are generated from DreamSave on the phone where the group account is loaded, and then sent from that phone to the group members. It is important to make sure that the phone with DreamSave has enough credits/airtime to send messages to all designated members.
How many SMS messages should groups expect to receive?
For a typical savings group of 30 members that meets on a weekly basis, the average number of SMS notifications is about 300 per month. This is estimated with the assumption that all members have phones, have added their phone numbers, and have activated SMS notification receipts on their DreamSave profiles.
To get the total number of SMS notifications for a specific set of groups, we have added a spreadsheet that can help calculate the average number of sent SMS messages per month. It is attached at the end of this article. Use the column entitled "Edit This" to enter the details about the group. You can later calculate how many messages a set of groups with the same characteristics will receive by filling in the "Number of groups" cell.
To get a good estimate of the total number of messages for a group, it is mandatory to have an idea of the following information:
- Number of Members
- Members with notifications enabled
- Cycle length (months left to complete cycle)
- Meeting frequency per month
- Loan term (Months)
We hope this article helped plan for SMS messages from DreamSave. We know how important transparency and trust are for savings groups and believe that these notifications will help alert members to significant changes in their group policies and finances. They will also remind members of their savings amounts, loan payments, fines, and more.