How Suvita uses SurveyCTO to build scalable data systems for childhood immunization programs across India

"What I really like about SurveyCTO is the flexibility it provides. You can build a simple form without needing any advanced programming, but if you have the technical capability, you can go much further with webhooks, APIs and custom plug-ins. I want to share our work with the wider ecosystem so that other nonprofits can do their work faster without having to go through the same learning curve. Ultimately, that helps increase our collective impact."

Meet Suvita

Suvita is an impact-driven, evidence-based nonprofit focused on increasing uptake of routine childhood vaccinations in India. Suvita focuses on interventions that are backed by rigorous evidence and can deliver impact cost-effectively at scale.

Suvita runs two complementary programs:

Sending out personalized SMS reminders to caregivers, informing them when their child is eligible for vaccination.
Identifying influencers in local communities and recruit them as immunisation ambassadors for their respective communities to spread vaccination information within their localities

Geography of work: India

Sector: International development

Use case: Field data collection, CATI, digitisation, workflow automation, and programme monitoring

Features used: CATI, webhooks, field plug-ins, API integrations, geolocation, advanced survey logic (repeat groups, conditional branching)

The Challenge: Delivering immunizations at scale

Delivering Suvita’s SMS reminder and Ambassador programs at scale requires managing large volumes of data and several interconnected operational workflows. From collecting and digitizing data in the field to conducting phone surveys, enrolling Immunization Ambassadors, and triggering timely messages to caregivers, Suvita needed systems that can reliably connect these different pieces while remaining manageable for a small technology team.

To implement both programs at scale, Suvita works in partnership with the governments of Maharashtra and Bihar. Their operations span a wide range of settings, including areas where internet connectivity can be unreliable. This creates both operational and data challenges when collecting information and managing program workflows at scale.

To reach a high volume of families, recruit ambassadors, and operate programs of this magnitude, Suvita needed data tools that could integrate with its wider technology infrastructure and support several different operational workflows, including:

Digitization of paper-based registers collected by field teams
CATI surveys for program monitoring and Ambassador recruitment
Real-time transfer of submissions and images into Suvita’s backend systems
Integration with calling and messaging platforms
Automated workflows triggered by survey responses
Regular syncing of SurveyCTO data into Suvita’s central database for monitoring and analysis

All of this needed to be supported by a technical team of only 2–3 people. This required data collection software that could be simple when the use case was simple, but flexible enough to support complex workflows that included integrations with Suvita’s backend systems, databases, calling platforms and messaging providers.

The Solution: SurveyCTO-based digital workflows that integrated CATI surveys with internal systems

Suvita chose SurveyCTO as the digital backbone of their field data collection and data workflows. They combined built-in features for CATI surveys with custom field plug-ins and integrations to create a seamless, near-real-time data ecosystem.

That data system consists of the following components.

1.Enrolling local ambassadors via CATI & telephony integration

Suvita’s CATI surveyors run phone surveys to identify, call, and enroll potential ambassadors. In order to conduct these complex enrollment calls, they use SurveyCTO forms armed with:

Advanced skip logic
Repeat groups
Conditional branching

In addition, Suvita needs to capture detailed call metadata like exact durations, ring counts, and connection statuses. To capture this, Suvita uses field plug-ins to allow their surveyors to launch phone calls using Exotel, a telephony platform, from within SurveyCTO forms and stream that metadata back into SurveyCTO. Suvita also built a custom plug-in to retrieve detailed Exotel call metadata such as duration, status, and timestamps.

Once a potential ambassador agrees to join the program, CATI surveyors could easily add the ambassador’s contact information from SurveyCTO mobile forms to their SMS messaging platform, Telerivet. This can then automatically trigger the relevant SMS or WhatsApp workflows.

2. Birth register digitization & real-time processing

In remote districts where centralized, digital medical records are unavailable, Suvita’s field officers visit hospitals to capture photos of paper birth registers, using geolocation features to validate their location. Then, they trigger the following two workflows at the same time:

The moment a registry form is finalized in the field, a SurveyCTO webhook sends the submission, including the register image, directly to Suvita’s backend API. The API then creates the required database records, assigns data-entry tasks, and starts downstream processing.
Because registry records are immediately available, Suvita’s data entry team can rapidly verify the newly-collected details.

3. Centralized monitoring & unified master database

Suvita keeps supervisors and program managers up-to-date on their programs by visualizing data in operational dashboards.

Suvita connects SurveyCTO data to a PostgreSQL database, creating a data system that acts as the single source of truth. ETL pipelines using the SurveyCTO Python library pull new submissions approximately every 30 minutes and sync the processed data into PostgreSQL, with data subsequently flowing into Suvita’s reporting system, which includes Google Data Studio and Suvita’s self-hosted Superset instance for operational monitoring. Some additional lightweight workflows also sync SurveyCTO data directly into Google Sheets.

The Results

Suvita has now been using SurveyCTO for over five years to great success. Suvita has sent over ~100 million SMS messages to caregivers since the creation of their SMS reminder program, including reminders about routine childhood vaccinations and antenatal care.

Suvita plans to continue using SurveyCTO’s suite of rich, powerful features to scale their operations and conduct research on vaccines and health across India.

Learn more about Suvita’s workflow in their recent webinar. Suvita has also open-sourced some of the tools and resources developed through this work. These are available through Suvita’s public GitHub repositories, so other nonprofits can build on them rather than having to solve the same problems from scratch.