Empowering people through accessible, usable data workflows
From the beginning, SurveyCTO has been guided by a set of principles that shape not only what we build, but how we build it. One of the most enduring is the belief that our technology should be easy to use and accessible in order to bring the benefits of high-quality data and the insights that come from that data to as many people as possible. Our focus on interoperability and extensibility are manifestations of this belief. We want to ensure that organizations are not beholden to one way of working; that instead, they are empowered to connect, integrate, or design workflows that meet their unique goals.
This philosophy has been our north star for over a decade, and it continues to guide us today as we expand the ways organizations can build using SurveyCTO as a foundation or as a piece of their larger puzzle.
From data collection to facilitating connected systems
At its core, SurveyCTO is a data collection platform. But in practice, we’ve become much more. High-quality data collection is only the beginning of the story; what matters just as much is how data moves between systems, connects previously siloed teams or platforms, and empowers action.
We’ve seen organizations take this principle further than we ever imagined when we first built SurveyCTO. For example:
- IDInsight, a global research and analytics organization, created SurveyStream, a tool that integrates with SurveyCTO to simplify the complex operations of large-scale survey management.
- Nyaka, a locally-led NGO, built a full electronic medical record (EMR) system, using SurveyCTO to capture patient data while integrating with Google Sheets to manage records.
- PowerSolve, software solution provider for carbon project developers, designed a digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (DMRV) solution with SurveyCTO powering its data collection layer.
These examples represent a much broader pattern. Our users aren’t just collecting data, they’re building systems with SurveyCTO—systems that are connected, adaptive, and designed to feed high-quality information into a wide range of systems and processes that depend on it. That is the role SurveyCTO plays today: not only the tool for capturing data, but also as a bridge that makes data usable across a larger ecosystem.
Building flexibility by design
This flexibility is something we have purposely designed and built our platform for. Our integration options make it easier for data to flow directly into CRMs, ERPs, analytics platforms, or any other tools you rely on, without adding manual work or creating silos. We use universal data formats like CSVs, not proprietary file formats, to ensure compatibility across platforms. Through our field plug-in ecosystem, users and developers have the ability to extend SurveyCTO itself through customizing form fields or embedding entirely new functionality directly into their workflows.
These intentional platform choices are designed to make it as easy as possible to adapt SurveyCTO to the way you already work.
What’s next: Bridging your workflows for a seamlessly connected ecosystem
If interoperability and extensibility are capabilities that already define SurveyCTO today, our roadmap is about deepening those same strengths. We continue to invest in making data—not just the data collected in SurveyCTO, but data from across your entire ecosystem—more accessible and usable.
Today, our users automate complex workflows, design best-practice surveys, and create robust data pipelines using powerful features like our API and AI form tools.
And we’re just getting started. We’re constantly exploring ways to expand the SurveyCTO experience by building on our promise of empowering secure, high-quality data collection, and also extending our capabilities in a way that lets you design and build the exact forms, workflows, or systems your organization needs.
We believe the future of data workflows is one where platforms communicate seamlessly and tools can be smoothly woven together to serve users across a variety of processes and workflows. Our commitment is to ensure SurveyCTO remains that bridge—powerful enough to stand alone as a data collection platform, yet open enough to serve as the pathway to your larger ecosystem.
Take a look at how users today are building with SurveyCTO and be inspired to do the same.
