Data Observability in WhatsApp Services for Social Impact
How a new data system helped Noora Health respond to Meta’s changing fee structure for social impact organizations
By Jake Hughey
Many of the world’s vulnerable populations are comfortable using WhatsApp, so many social impact organizations offer services there. These organizations often rely on WhatsApp’s social impact fee waiver program, which has given eligible organizations a 100% discount on the platform’s standard business messaging fees.
Here we describe a recent change to that program that has created significant cost pressures for nonprofits working through WhatsApp, and a practical example of how we’ve worked to relieve those pressures.
Managing messaging infrastructure at scale
An organization we partner with, Noora Health, uses WhatsApp to provide evidence-based guidance and support for caregivers of pregnant women, new mothers and their babies, and people managing a range of health conditions across India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal. Their service operates at a significant scale, sending roughly 60,000 WhatsApp messages daily. Like many nonprofits delivering services through WhatsApp, Noora Health has depended on the social impact fee waiver program to keep its programs financially sustainable.
Noora Health’s WhatsApp services are based largely on message templates managed through the WhatsApp Business Platform. Each template includes fixed content – such as text, images, or video – alongside customizable fields such as recipient name. Meta classifies these templates into three categories: authentication (such as one-time passcodes), utility (important and non-promotional information requested or needed by the user), and marketing (a broad category covering most other forms of outreach or engagement).
Until recently, participation in WhatsApp’s social impact fee waiver program meant that Noora could send messages across all three template categories at no cost. But that changed on April 1, when a change to the fee waiver program took effect: now, messages based on marketing templates no longer qualify for the 100% discount, while fees on utility and authentication templates are still waived. Noora Health was managing about 8,000 message templates across its four countries of operation, 10 languages, and multiple health conditions. The vast majority of these templates (about 7,500) were marketing, about 500 were utility, and only three were authentication.
The cost implications of the new fees for marketing templates were immediately obvious – and daunting: about US$650 per day. Compounding matters, Meta occasionally recategorizes templates from utility to marketing without advance notice or explanation. These recategorizations do more than increase costs: about 30% of messages based on marketing templates are blocked by Meta’s systems “to maintain a healthy ecosystem,” creating potential disruptions to caregiver communication and service delivery.
Improving data observability across Noora Health’s WhatsApp services
This change created multiple urgent operational challenges. Noora Health needed to adapt its messaging campaigns and redesign messages wherever possible to prioritize utility templates. More fundamentally, however, the organization needed observability into the status of its message templates.
Previously, product managers had to manually log into multiple WhatsApp Business accounts to check the status of templates. At Noora Health’s ever-growing scale and messaging complexity, this process was untenable. The team also had no way to track how many messages of each template category were being delivered each day, making it hard to estimate costs or respond quickly to template recategorizations.
In collaboration with Noora Health’s product and engineering teams, we designed and built an end-to-end data flow that leverages the organization’s existing data systems. The new flow provides a comprehensive, up-to-date view of all WhatsApp templates through a dashboard and alerts (see sample screenshots below). It also enables the team to monitor how many messages of each template category are delivered daily in each country, track associated costs, and identify which marketing templates have incurred the highest costs in a given timeframe. The new system marks a dramatic improvement in the observability of Noora Health’s WhatsApp service.
How the system works
For technical details on implementing a similar solution for your organization, see here. More broadly, this project is an example of how The Agency Fund supports partner organizations in using technology and data to better measure and improve the impact and cost-effectiveness of their products and services.
If your organization has faced (and/or solved) similar challenges, we’d love to hear about your experience – please reach out to us via email: tech@agency.fund