It’s been a year we won’t forget. Here’s what to take with you into 2026
2025 was a momentous year.
Across the industries that SurveyCTO serves, organizations pivoted their data collection strategies in response to funding changes, economic challenges, and growing opportunities provided by technological innovations in areas like artificial intelligence.
Data collection won’t look the same in 2026 as it did this year, or in the past. The need for data to prove impact for NGOs, nonprofit organizations, and mission-driven companies is greater than ever. At the same time, data standards have also become more rigorous as data interoperability grows in importance.
As we prepare for the end of this year and look ahead to the next one, we wanted to take a moment to:
- Share product highlights you might have missed
- Equip you to collect your best data ever in 2026 (and beyond)
- Spotlight innovation and resilience from SurveyCTO users
Let’s dive in.
Start building with SurveyCTO
If you gather data, you probably do more than simply gather data.
Data is not collected for its own sake, but for a purpose: To inform decisions, change outcomes, and help you more clearly understand participants, customers, and the challenges that we all face.
For the companies, organizations and researchers that collect data digitally, the purpose behind their data often leads to the creation of digital systems to get that data into a wide range of applications and processes that depend on it.
At SurveyCTO, we see ourselves now as not only the essential tool for primary data collection, but also as the bridge that makes that data useful and impactful in a myriad of ways. This data magic happens when users build custom solutions and applications on top of SurveyCTO, like Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems, multi-system monitoring and evaluation flows, feedback and complaint trackers, or survey management systems.
To unlock the full power of SurveyCTO and create your own applications and connected, multi-form workflows, there are a couple key features you should know about:
Our API enables the automatic transfers of data between our platform and other platforms you already use, like CRMs, EHRs, and more. With these automated workflows in place, you can collect data in SurveyCTO and visualize, clean, analyze, and update it in external systems before syncing it back into SurveyCTO to inform downstream data collection.
Our datasets are living, dynamic, cloud-based databases that enable information to flow seamlessly and securely across projects, forms, and systems. The multiple types of datasets available in SurveyCTO lets data collected in one form or system become available in downstream forms and workflows. You can also use them to monitor data quality in bulk across forms, combine multi-form submissions, and much, much more!
Sign up for SurveyCTO Academy
Want to fast track your SurveyCTO learning?
Sign up for the SurveyCTO Academy! This year, we streamlined that process for SurveyCTO users with the arrival of the SurveyCTO Academy, our new and improved online learning experience.
SurveyCTO Academy features a series of individual courses on all things SurveyCTO, with interactive components for testing your knowledge as you go along. The Academy also offers customizable learning plans, enabling unique e-learning opportunities for entire data collection teams.
Users who complete courses in SurveyCTO Academy earn a certificate that demonstrates platform proficiency, and can be shared with colleagues and on social media platforms.
Enroll in SurveyCTO Academy today
Explore SurveyCTO’s professional services
We aren’t just a premier data collection platform for primary data collection. We’re also here to empower your growth as a data-driven, impact-making professional.
Team SurveyCTO offers customized, professional services that allow you to unlock the full potential of our platform. If you need more customized or hands-on consultation for your data collection or data workflow needs, explore our professional services! They include:
- User onboarding
- SurveyCTO form and workflow design
- Dashboard creation
- Tailored field plug-in design
- Other custom options!
Get inspired by users like you
Organizations all over the world are creating lasting change with the data they collect using SurveyCTO. Here are a few standout examples from 2025:
In this webinar, get an exclusive look at how data, research and analytics firm Laterite used SurveyCTO to gather geospatial data for the Rainforest Alliance in the San Martin region of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest.
The Laterite team takes you behind the scenes of this project to explain how MBTiles and QGIS were used in conjunction with SurveyCTO to let their team collect precise land boundaries of cocoa and coffee farms.
The team at Laterite has also put together a written resource to guide teams that want to implement this technique in their workflows.
Internationally recognized consulting firm Particip Gmbh, in collaboration with consortium partner KIT, undertook a technically complex and high-stakes assignment to measure critical health indicators across 17,000+ households in Afghanistan through the Afghanistan Health Survey.
The challenge? Respecting cultural norms around gender while gathering accurate, in-person data in Afghani households.
Using SurveyCTO’s offline case management features, including offline case transfers, Particip was able to ensure that both male and female data collectors were able to have completely separate but simultaneous interviews with respondents, adhering to cultural norms while collecting high-quality data.
100WEEKS is a Dutch organization lifting women out of poverty in a radical and direct way: By giving them money directly.
Using SurveyCTO’s CATI, case management, and offline functionality, 100WEEKS gathers critical longitudinal data for monitoring and evaluation of their program.
Using SurveyCTO for longitudinal M&E has paid off for 100WEEKS. Their cash transfer program is now credited with the following results:
- 56,000 people (over 10,000 families) have been given the resources to start a better life
- 80% of women in the 100WEEKS program have been able to stay out of poverty 4 years after program completion
- Food security for these women has vastly improved, with 72% still being food secure two years after program completion
Looking ahead
It’s that time: Wrapping up goals from 2025 and looking ahead to new data collection heights in 2026. As you celebrate a new year and anticipate more changes to field data collection and survey research, know that SurveyCTO is in the thick of it with you. We’re pivoting, learning, expanding, and iterating on new product offerings and ways to reach users—and we believe the future is bright for the data-driven.
Are you looking for a new data collection platform? There’s never been a better time to start a free trial or request a demo. And if you’re an existing user planning for 2026, customized Enterprise subscription plans unlock additional capacity and functionality that will take your data work to a new level—and our team is here to guide you through every step of the process.
