Campaigns

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This guide will take you through the process of setting up a USSD campaign from your Dashboard.

Guide Sections

Creating a Campaign
Creating Nodes
Handling User Responses
Handling Invalid User Responses
Ending Sessions

Creating a Campaign

Log in to your Dashboard and navigate to CAMPAIGNS > USSD > CREATE CAMPAIGN.

01

The following options will be displayed:

  • Campaign Name – This is the name of the campaign that you are creating.
  • Campaign Type – A normal campaign is where all the USSD strings and responses are handled on the Panacea Mobile USSD system where you are able to edit the nodes and responses. A proxy campaign will fetch text from your server and push the responses back to your server.
  • Select Country – This allows you to select the country that you have a USSD string available in.
  • Rate Band – This is the amount that users will be charged when accessing your USSD string.
  • String – This is the number that people can dial to initiate your USSD campaign.

Once you have entered all the details required you can click Save to create the campaign. You’ll then be taken to the Edit screen for your campaign.

02

Creating Nodes

Think of a node as a page in your USSD campaign that displays text to your users. Users can then type and submit their own response to that node. You can then direct users to different nodes based on their responses.

When you create your USSD campaign it will contain a default node named Home.  To edit it simply select the edit option to the right of the node you want to edit.

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You can then edit the name and the text.

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Handling User Responses

As you can see from the example above we’re asking the user to respond with either 1 or 2. You can then direct the user to different nodes based on their response. To do this simply click on Add Response to create one of these rules.

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You can create a new node to send the user while setting up your response, just select – Add new node – as the target node. You can then set up the new node as per the example below.

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Once you’ve entered your text for the new node you can click the Add Node button to save the new node and return to the original Home node that you were working on. This way you can easily create multiple nodes from the node you are busy with. Just click on the Add Response button again and follow the same process.

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For the second node we want to create a page handles the scenario where the user did not wish to continue with the survey. In this case you can end the session and allow no further responses by ticking End session on this node checkbox.

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Once you are happy with your node you can click on the Add Node button to be taken back to the home node.

Protip: All responses from the session are stored and can be used in subsequent nodes by referencing the node name in our #MACRO# format. For example, adding #HOME# to the text for a node will display the response the user gave on the Home node.

Handling Invalid User Responses

What happens if your user doesn’t respond with either 1 or 2? Well, by default we’ll display the same original text for them to have another try. However, if you want to edit the text that is displayed for invalid responses you can just tick the Edit text for invalid response checkbox that is below your nodes Responses.

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Once you’ve finished editing all the components of your Home node you can click Save to update everything.

Perhaps now you want to edit another node that you’ve created. To do this simply select the node name from the drop down menu at the top right of the screen.

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This will take you to the Main Menu node’s screen. You can then edit that node just like you did with the Home node. We now want to set all of the three responses to take the user to a Thank You node. Just add the new node from your first Response and point all three responses to it once it’s been created.

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Ending a session

If this is the last node you wish to add you can also select the End session on this node option. You can only have one starting node, but depending on the branching structure of your USSD campaign you are able to have multiple end nodes:

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Once you have setup the node as above your can set all the responses to point to it. To make the new node selectable in the drop-boxes you will first need to save the changes on this node. Once done you can set the responses to look like the below:

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Once done you can Save your node.

Congrats on creating your first USSD campaign! You can test the campaign by dialling your campaign string.