We've been collaborating with J-PAL for months on their MITx course "Designing and Running Randomized Evaluations" - and we're excited that students will finally get to participate in the SurveyCTO activities we've helped design.
Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing my colleague, Vikas Arora, who has over a decade of experience in the public health sector. Prior to joining Dobility India, he worked in the pharmaceutical industry, taught public health courses at university, and managed mHealth projects in rural areas. I asked Vikas about his work and the opportunities he see to further engage public health researchers in India.
The Ministry of Agriculture in Haiti (Le Ministère de l’Agriculture, des Ressources Naturelles et du Développement Rural) recently collaborated with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on two impact assessments in Haiti. We connected with Jery Rambao, the field coordinator for the study, and Sébastien Gachot, a rural development specialist at IDB, to learn more about their work.
Researchers at the Right to Education Resource Centre of the Indian Institute of Management are studying the implementation of the RTE Act in Indian states, with a special focus on Section 12(1)(c), which mandates that a minimum of 25% of seats in private primary schools be reserved for children from disadvantaged economic backgrounds. Right now, they are working in collaboration with Central Square Foundation (and using SurveyCTO!) to follow up with 2000 children who were part of an earlier study on the impact of different information campaigns on enrolling eligible students in private schools.
Dobility today announced the launch of the SurveyCTO “Data Explorer,” a first-of-its-kind tool for visualizing encrypted data from the convenience of a web browser. Available exclusively to SurveyCTO users, the Data Explorer reaffirms Dobility’s commitment to translating research best practices into easy-to-use features.
The Population Council conducts research to address critical health and development issues around the world. We recently connected with Andrea J. Melnikas about the Council's work in empowering and improving the lives of adolescent girls through her research on child marriage. She is using tools like WhatsApp and Google Sheets for real-time monitoring and collaboration in India, Malawi, Mali, and Niger to determine approaches to delay early marriage.
Maria Jones and Florence Kondylis share hard-won "Lessons from a crowdsourcing failure" in Rwanda in their latest post on the World Bank's Development Impact blog. (We're glad that SurveyCTO was part of the solution after they ended their relationship with an unnamed technology partner.)
So you’ve decided to go digital for your next data collection project. Great decision! Perhaps you were persuaded by some of the benefits of going digital including lower cost, higher-quality data, and more immediate access to your data. Or perhaps you’re just tired of printing pages and pages of paper forms, dragging them around, keeping them organized, and spending hours and hours entering the data you collected by hand. Whatever your reasons, we’re here to help ensure that your first digital data collection project is a success.
Dobility founder and CEO Dr. Christopher Robert discusses the role of business in social impact, what it means to stay "lean" as a social enterprise, and the opportunities afforded by digital data collection on The Impact Podcast with Innov8social's Neetal Parekh.
We recently caught up with Taylor Downs, founder of OpenFn and co-founder of Vera Solutions, to learn more about how he's helping international organizations harness data for social impact, his recommendations for creating dashboards, and some of the cool automations available to SurveyCTO users.
With the launch of our drag-and-drop form designer and the free Community edition of SurveyCTO earlier this year, SurveyCTO has become even more accessible for small-scale NGOs, students, and researchers, not to mention users who are just getting started with survey design. We hear wonderful feedback from our users daily, and we thought we'd take this opportunity to share a few recent testimonials.
We're kicking off a new series for the SurveyCTO blog - photos from our users around the world. This round, we're featuring submissions from the Philippines, Mozambique, Uganda, and more.
Thanks to everyone who helped us celebrate the launch of Dobility India at "Small Data, Big Impact," the panel discussion we hosted last week in Ahmedabad, India. It was wonderful to see…
In this week's Terms of Reference podcast by Aidpreneur, Dobility founder and CEO Dr. Christopher Robert tells the SurveyCTO origin story (fun fact: it involves squirrels), discusses why he founded Dobility as a for-profit company, and provides a critical analysis of the development landscape.
The true front line for data quality – the place where the battle for data accuracy is often won or lost – is the point of original data collection. This is the reason why we have been focusing our SurveyCTO efforts on how to help our users collect higher-quality data, and the reason why we’re painfully aware of the so many ways that we and our users could do better.
This year, join SurveyCTO from June 7-9 at HumTech2016, the annual conference that brings "together scientists, engineers, technologists and policymakers from across academic, government, industry and non-government organizations to discuss, share and promote current research and recent accomplishments across all aspects of technology, from science to systems, that have a global humanitarian impact."
For a Masters in Public Policy course at Harvard Kennedy School, we wanted to shift a pandemic simulation from in-class to before-class. Read more to learn how we did it with SurveyCTO...
People have been talking about human-centered design for years, and there is always much enthusiasm for how the core principles might apply in the development context. In this blog post, I try to bring things down to earth, discussing ways that project and in-country teams might use SurveyCTO to put good design principles into practice.
It started as a modest experiment in electronic data collection embedded within a much more ambitious experiment involving microfinance in rural India. Today, SurveyCTO has grown into a mature technology platform used to collect data in hundreds of projects around the world. This inaugural blog post seems like a good time to look briefly back, and then forward to where SurveyCTO is headed...