Building on work from our last collaboration in Fall 2024, skilled volunteers from Salesforce joined Team4tech in Asuncion, Paraguay for another impactful project with Fundación Paraguaya. In this skills-based volunteering project, Salesforce employees helped NGO staff advance programs and services for families and explore AI tools for data analysis and a virtual assistant.
I was so moved by the passionate members of Fundacion Paraguaya and want to make sure I show up with that same passion in the work that I do. It was an incredible opportunity to meet Salesforce team members across the globe and get a better sense for the work that they do. In addition, it was great to have individuals with different skill sets as it allowed us to leverage the strengths of each team member and really collaborate in meaningful ways.”
Carolyn Passey, Head of Customer Success, Salesforce
Building Capacity for an NGO Addressing Poverty Worldwide
Fundación Paraguaya is a non-governmental organization (NGO) committed to poverty alleviation worldwide. Through innovative approaches and comprehensive support, including microfinance services, entrepreneurship training, and education programs, Fundación Paraguaya helps individuals and communities to break the cycle of poverty. Their Poverty Stoplight program enables families to assess their poverty levels across various economic and social dimensions and create personalized plans to build better lives for themselves and their communities.
Co-Designing Solutions to Grow Program Impact
In a 5-day project, Team4Tech facilitated collaboration between five Salesforce volunteers and the Poverty Stoplight and Microfinance teams at Fundación Paraguaya to explore AI solutions for data analysis and a support chatbot, and to develop new programs and services for clients.
Fundación Paraguaya’s microfinance program works to improve the financial stability and overall well-being of families in the community, as measured by their social and economic indicators on the Poverty Stoplight assessment. One subteam of Salesforce volunteers collaborated with the microfinance team to identify opportunities for improved strategies, products, and services.
In consultation with a microfinance women’s committee and staff from Fundación Paraguaya, the volunteers developed ideas for new services for the Microfinance program’s consideration. Proposals included:
- additional education and training that women could complete in their own time
- childcare solutions allowing women to dedicate more focused time to their businesses
- opportunities for women to grow their small businesses by selling their goods through an international marketplace
As flexible opportunities for education and training surfaced as a priority, volunteers focused on designing a virtual micro-learning platform through Fundación Paraguaya’s existing microfinance client app. Volunteers proposed bite-sized learning blocks and gamification features to make the app accessible and engaging to use. The recommended learning modules start with entrepreneurial skills, financial literacy, and digital tools so women can focus on foundational needs first. The adoption plan incorporates peer learning and mentorship to build on the current support the women receive from their Fundación Paraguaya in-person mentors and from each other.
To facilitate Fundación Paraguaya’s next steps in developing the micro-learning platform, volunteers delivered the following:
- Content Project Plan
- Technical Considerations for Gamification
- A Micro-Learning Template for Mobile App
- A Learning Module Outline
- Communications Plan and Timeline
App Development Roadmap and sample Learning Module Outlines for the micro-learning solution.
Integrating AI in Data Analysis and a Chatbot to Support Families
The other subteam of two skilled volunteers worked with the Poverty Stoplight technology and data analysis teams on enhancing an assistant chatbot with artificial intelligence and exploring machine learning algorithms to gather better insights from the Poverty Stoplight survey data.
- Improving the Poverty Stoplight chatbot with AI: The Poverty Stoplight team has already developed a chatbot to reach families via WhatsApp—an initiative supported by previous Team4Tech volunteers. The chatbot allows families to access their results from the Poverty Stoplight assessment and view the indicators they have prioritized to work on. In this project, the Salesforce volunteers and Poverty Stoplight technology team worked together to add an AI assistant to the chatbot. The AI assistant will be able to access the Poverty Stoplight’s solution database as its internal knowledge-base to retrieve better answers and offer personalized solutions and resources to families for improving their indicators.
- Utilizing machine learning for data analysis: Salesforce volunteers recommended AI methods for exploratory analysis that can help Fundación Paraguaya gather deeper insights from their data. Collaborating with the Poverty Stoplight team, volunteers reviewed the data collected from the family surveys, helped structure it in a more efficient format for analysis, and provided training on machine learning metrics that can help the team identify relationships between indicators and trends over time. These insights can provide more context on the issues families face, allow for comparisons, and help Fundación Paraguaya provide more targeted resources.
Accelerating Impact of a Long-Term NGO Partner
Fundación Paraguaya is a Team4Tech alumni partner. Since 2019, Team4Tech has facilitated 9 skilled volunteering projects with 85 volunteers, supporting the organization in strengthening their technology infrastructure and advancing innovations in their programs.
What we enjoyed the most about working with Team4Tech is that we can make connections that we wouldn’t be able to do in isolation. It would be much more difficult to do this work on our own since there aren’t many spaces to build Tech for Good in Paraguay. We also like the learning experiences that this type of project leaves us with. This project will help us lay the foundations to start with ML (machine learning) models to analyze data; it will help us strengthen our plan to reach 100,000 families with the Microfinance project; and it will help us launch a different iteration of the chatbot.”
Karina Bogarin, Tech Project Manager, Poverty Stoplight at Fundación Paraguaya
This project is just one example of Team4Tech’s global contributions to building the capacity and accelerating the impact of community-based organizations worldwide.