How the MBOS Communications Portal works
From setting up a workspace to reporting on results: campaigns and groups, tracked delivery, rewards with a hard cap, live dashboards and PoPIA-ready consent.
1. Your workspace
A workspace is one company or one client. It carries its own name, logo, colours, people, messaging provider, rewards and results, and nothing crosses from one workspace to another. Agencies run several side by side and switch between them in a click.
2. A campaign with groups
A campaign is one piece of research. Inside it you add groups, one per audience: LSM band, city, store, customer type. Each group can carry its own questions, its own reward value and its own reward limit, so a single campaign can compare five audiences at once.
3. People and consent
Load names and mobile numbers from a spreadsheet. Numbers are cleaned into the correct South African format and anything unreadable is shown back to you before you send. Every survey starts with a clear opt-in that is recorded with the wording the person actually saw.
4. The message and the link
Write a short invitation. The portal shows what the send will cost as you type. Each person gets their own short link on your own web address, and links expire after the number of days you choose.
5. Rewards with a hard limit
Decide how many people get a reward. Rewards go out in the order people finish and stop exactly at the limit, even when hundreds finish in the same second. You cannot go live promising more than you have loaded.
6. Results, spend and proof
Delivery results and replies flow back from your provider automatically. The dashboard shows sent, answered, rewarded, spent and cost per completed survey, with colour-coded health so a slow campaign stands out. Everything exports to spreadsheet, CSV, PDF or slides.
Common questions
- Do the people we contact need an app or data?
- No. They get a message with a link. The survey page is a light web page that opens on any phone browser.
- Can we use our own messaging provider?
- Yes. Add the account you already have, or pick a recommended provider from the list. You can keep a test account and a live account and switch between them.
- Who can see mobile numbers?
- Only the workspace owner, campaign managers and reward managers. Everyone else sees partly hidden numbers and totals. This is enforced by the endpoints and again by the database itself.
- What happens when the reward budget runs out?
- Rewards stop at your limit, and the survey keeps collecting answers if you want it to. Nobody is promised a reward that does not exist.
- Can it plug into our own systems?
- Yes. There is a workspace-scoped REST API with keys, scopes and webhooks, described in an OpenAPI file on the Developers page.