Lessons from scaling up enumerator hiring with Laterite

Laterite is a data, research, and technical advisory firm based in Rwanda and Ethiopia - and uses SurveyCTO for everything from short M&E questionnaires to long, complex impact evaluations in education, health, agriculture, governance, and other sectors. Recently, they started using SurveyCTO in innovative ways to streamline and scale up their enumerator hiring and management processes.

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So you’ve decided to go digital… now what?

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.

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The government shut down the internet. Can I still use SurveyCTO?

The SurveyCTO team occasionally fields questions about how to keep projects running smoothly, even when, for example, the government shuts down the internet. Most recently, we've been hearing from users in Ethiopia who are struggling to manage government restrictions on accessing the internet.

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Dashboards, integrations, and automations: Connecting with OpenFn

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.

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Hacking Google Sheets for real-time dashboards (9 tricks)

Google Sheets can be a powerful tool for real-time monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning. But how can you optimize your setup to work with data that is streaming in from survey forms or other integrations? How can you turn Google Sheets from a tool designed for static data into one that gracefully handles dynamic, real-time data?

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Features news: HTML, tables, and GPS enhancements

Welcome to SurveyCTO 2.12! Our latest release focuses on bread-and-butter issues central to many projects: how to format questions in the clearest, most effective way; how to help users better understand and navigate groups of repeated questions; and how to most effectively capture GPS positions.

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Social impact through data with Outline India

Nishmeet Singh is a Senior Research Analyst with Outline India, a research firm focused on impact at the grassroots level through data-driven decision-making. With two degrees in economics and experience working on projects with Save the Children, Girl Rising, Water Aid, and IMPAQ International, we were eager to learn more about his role at Outline India, his advice for other researchers, and his recent research on forced child labor in the mica mining areas of Jharkhand.

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SurveyCTO: You don’t need to be a ‘computer genius’ to use it!
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SurveyCTO: You don’t need to be a ‘computer genius’ to use it!

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.

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Improving patient safety in Kenya with the World Bank Group

The Kenya Patient Safety Impact Evaluation (KePSIE) is a unique partnership between the Kenyan Government and the World Bank Group (WBG). It is the largest trial to date aimed at improving patient safety in low- and middle-income countries. We wanted to learn more about KePSIE and how SurveyCTO is playing a role in the research, so we reached out to Guadalupe Bedoya, an economist in the Development Impact Evaluation team at the World Bank's Research Group and the Team Leader and co-principal investigator of the impact evaluation.

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Considerations when working with service providers

Many organizations work with service providers and local survey firms to implement their research projects. But how do you ensure data quality, data security, and timely – even immediate – access to your data? If you work with service providers or survey firms, you can demand that they use a data collection technology like SurveyCTO and set up simple yet powerful systems for quality control and real-time monitoring.

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Considerations for service providers

When you use SurveyCTO for your data collection, you collect better data, your data is more secure, and your turn-around time is faster. As a service provider or survey firm, you may have encountered prospective or current clients who wanted to learn more about the opportunities afforded by digital data collection. To help you make the case for digital data collection, we've created the resources below from the perspective of a service provider. Feel free to adapt these materials when discussing SurveyCTO with your clients.

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Running lab-in-the-field experiments in Haiti

What are the advantages - and challenges - of running an experiment in the field rather than in a lab? We recently caught up with long-time SurveyCTO user Abbie Turiansky about her research, specifically the lab-in-the-field experiments she has run in Haiti. Abbie is a PhD candidate at UC Davis in the Agricultural and Resource Economics department, focusing on social behavior related to the provision and management of public goods and common-pool resources.

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We’re hiring: Sales, Customer, and Community Support

For this position, we are looking for somebody to join our sales and support team. A pillar of our growth and a core part of our mission is not just to provide a great product, but also to provide incredible support and service; we are growing our team to improve our efforts on that front. The ideal candidate will be an excellent communicator with prior experience in outreach, sales, and managing relationships with prospective and existing customers.

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