How the Magaliesberg Biosphere used Yazi's WhatsApp surveys to reach 568+ people and capture rich, community-driven insights for a landscape assessment.
How the Magaliesberg Biosphere and University of Pretoria used Yazi's WhatsApp surveys to reach 568+ community members and capture rich, media-driven insights for a landscape assessment and global conservation project.
The Magaliesberg Biosphere, in collaboration with the University of Pretoria, needed to conduct a wide-reaching landscape assessment to inform their ten-year review and support the global BECOME project — a seven-university consortium investigating youth engagement and conservation in biospheres worldwide.
The objectives were twofold: capture perceptions, challenges, and benefits of living in the biosphere from diverse community voices, and increase youth participation in research — supplementing previous in-person youth workshops with a digital, scalable data collection method.
They also wanted to pilot an accessible, media-rich, mobile-first methodology that could serve as a blueprint for future NGO and impact projects across Africa and beyond.
Conservation research in biosphere reserves has traditionally relied on in-person workshops, paper surveys, and email-based outreach — methods that struggle to reach the communities most affected by conservation policy.
Traditional paper or email-based surveys couldn't access rural, peri-urban, and youth communities at the scale needed for a representative landscape assessment.
Previous in-person workshops had engaged some young people, but digital-native youth needed a channel they already used daily — not another platform to sign up for.
Tick-box surveys captured broad trends but missed the stories — the lived experiences, local knowledge, and emotional connections that drive conservation outcomes.
The biosphere team didn't have thousands of individual phone numbers — they needed a distribution method that worked through existing community networks, not one-to-one outreach.
Yazi provided a WhatsApp-based survey platform that let the biosphere team distribute a single secure link through existing community networks — WhatsApp groups, university lecturers, and Facebook — rather than collecting individual phone numbers.
The survey was co-designed by the biosphere team and the University of Pretoria, with ethical clearance handled for the youth component. A secure link was shared with explanatory text and the Biosphere's logo to enhance trust.
Community members didn't need to download an app or create an account. They tapped a link in a trusted WhatsApp group and started sharing — in their own language, in their own voice, from wherever they were.
Over 568 people started the survey in the first month — a scale that would have been impossible via phone calls, email, or paper surveys, especially given the dispersed geography and limited existing contact lists.
More than 100 voice notes and dozens of images and videos were submitted, providing context-specific evidence that written surveys alone rarely deliver. Audio and visual content allowed the research team to "hear and see" impact stories directly — supporting more nuanced reporting to funders, stakeholders, and the global BECOME consortium.
The Magaliesberg team used Yazi's dashboard to filter responses by age group, location, and response type — seeing, for example, how youth versus older adults engaged, and where the richest qualitative data was coming from.
| Traditional Survey | Yazi WhatsApp Survey | |
|---|---|---|
| Reach | Limited to email lists and in-person events | 568+ people in the first month via WhatsApp groups |
| Distribution | Requires individual contact details | Single link shared through existing community networks |
| Data richness | Text-only tick-box responses | Voice notes, photos, videos alongside text |
| Youth engagement | Relies on in-person workshops | Digital-native channel youth already use daily |
| Monitoring | Results available after fieldwork closes | Real-time dashboard with drop-off tracking |
| Trust | Unfamiliar survey platforms | WhatsApp — the tool communities already trust |
The Magaliesberg study surfaced important methodological insights for future NGO and impact research projects using WhatsApp.
The biosphere team gathered a large, demographically mixed evidence base for their ten-year review — with qualitative depth that previous methods hadn't delivered. The ability to filter by area and see media responses helped them understand who they were reaching and what was really happening on the ground.
The study provided a scalable, mobile-first methodology that the seven-university BECOME consortium can adapt for youth engagement and conservation research in biospheres across different countries — a replicable blueprint for community-level data collection.
It's a useful tool — you can get quite far and wide, and that's quite nice. The ability to analyse by area and see media responses helps us understand who we're reaching, and what's really happening on the ground. We'd be happy to use it again, and to recommend it to others looking for real community insight.
Conservation and impact research has long faced a tension between depth and reach. Gathering authentic community voices — the stories, the emotions, the lived experiences that shape policy — has traditionally required in-person fieldwork that limits scale. Meanwhile, digital surveys scale but lose the richness.
The Magaliesberg study showed that WhatsApp can bridge that gap. By meeting communities on the platform they already trust, with the ability to respond in their own voice and their own language, the biosphere team captured something that neither a paper survey nor a focus group could: 568 people, dozens of voice notes and images, geographic insight, and a dataset rich enough to inform a global university consortium — all from a single secure link shared through existing community networks.
Interested in running a similar study?
Book a Demo →
%202.png)