Facilitating Media Distribution with Monetary Incentives

Community media forums such as CGNet Swara and Mobile Vaani leverage interactive voice response (IVR) technology to enable feature phone owners in underprivileged regions of the world to call a toll-free phone number and listen to and report local stories. This excludes potential users living in areas without any mobile network. In this paper, we describe the deployment of an app that both facilitates a new means of media dissemination using a novel incentive scheme, and enables content collection, from no-network areas. In partnership with CGNet Swara, we deployed our app in the rural Indian states of Chhattisgarh and Telangana. In one month, 20,955 stories were transferred through Bluetooth to 2,443 unique phones, for which a total of $930 in mobile airtime credits was disbursed to 307 of the 680 users that installed the app. In an 81-day period, 537 local stories were reported using the app from 117 unique users. We present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of user behavior.