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When Martiza Félix receives a WhatsApp message from someone saying their son is in detention or they just crossed the border and need help, she stops everything to respond. “My priorities are to serve the community,” the founder of Conecta Arizona says, even if this puts her behind on the many administrative tasks of a publisher.
Félix is a Mexican immigrant, Latina and journalist who built her career writing and producing on both sides of the border. When it comes to communicating with family and sources, there’s one tool that reigns supreme.
“The only thing that we use to communicate and to say good morning and see how everybody’s doing is WhatsApp,” says Félix, referring to the platforms’ ubiquity among many diasporic communities. “I used to say that I was the queen of WhatsApp, but the real queen of WhatsApp is my mom because she religiously — every single morning — sends us all the [graphics of] glitters, all the quotes or the prayers, all the flowers and things that you can think of.”
In 2020, Félix quickly found WhatsApp to be the perfect platform to tackle misinformation and deliver trustworthy information about the coronavirus to immigrant communities.
She started a WhatsApp group to streamline her coronavirus fact-checks with friends and families, and the group quickly grew to surpass the platform’s limits. She then formally launched Conecta Arizona from her home in Phoenix as a service to connect Spanish-speakers along the Arizona-Mexico border.
“Three years later, we have communities, we have groups, we have podcasts, we have a radio show, we have a newsletter — a little bit of everything,” she says, adding they have eight WhatsApp groups and lists, with members representing seven countries. All products combined, Conecta Arizona reaches an audience of around 100,000.
“We have grown a lot. But the heart of Conecta Arizona still beats on WhatsApp. That’s where we listen to the community that we serve, that’s where we have conversations, where all the magic happens that inspires everything else that we do,” she says.
How can independent publishers best make use of WhatsApp? Félix shares what they’ve learned in three years.
Have a clear goal in mind
How you approach WhatsApp will depend on your goal. For Conecta Arizona, the goal is to create conversations and deepen relationships — more middle of the marketing funnel — rather than reaching new readers.
“If you want to distribute content there are so many platforms that you can do that,” Félix says. “WhatsApp is to have conversations, and you need to be willing and committed to have conversations. If not, this is a waste of time,” she says.
It’s for this reason that Conecta Arizona doesn’t actively use WhatsApp’s new service Channels, as it doesn’t enable two-way messaging.
Conecta Arizona’s eight chat groups and broadcast lists are where they converse. Broadcast lists enable them to send updates to a bunch of people at once but community members receive them as direct messages. “We don’t want to be a massive media outlet. That’s not part of our mission at all. It’s the personal touch, the one-on-one,” Félix explains.
Moderate the conversations
“Everybody can have a WhatsApp group,” Félix says. “But moderating — trying to embrace difficult conversations to fight misinformation to not polarize your community,” is the service Conecta Arizona provides.
To facilitate this, Félix launched La Hora del Cafecito on WhatsApp where they invite an expert to sit down and moderate a Conecta Arizona group conversation for an hour on a certain topic.
“It is quite challenging sometimes because experts are not used to being interviewed by community members with no filters and no prep on WhatsApp,” she says. “And it can get a little bit overwhelming because it’s just having coffee with your friends. You change topics quite often.”
But the chaos is part of what makes it engaging and fun, and Conecta has now hosted more than a thousand of these online community events.
Moderation is notoriously limited on WhatsApp: When Conecta first launched it was not possible to delete messages, so Félix had to quickly screenshot and label certain comments as false, making fact-checking much more difficult.
Now it’s possible to delete messages containing misinformation. Conecta Arizona also shares community guidelines asking members to use the send-for-admin-review function, where community members submit links they want to share to admins first for approval.
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