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. At Suvita, we’ve been using SurveyCTO with success for the last five years, and 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:

SMS Reminders: Sending out personalized SMS reminders to caregivers, informing them when their child is eligible for vaccination.
Ambassadors: Identifying influencers in local communities and recruiting them as Immunization 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 program monitoring

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

The Challenge: Delivering immunizations at scale

In order to deliver Suvita’s SMS Reminders and Ambassadors programs at scale, Suvita manages large volumes of data and several interconnected operational workflows. Suvita needed systems that can reliably connect these different workflows and integrate with its wider technology infrastructure, while remaining manageable for a small technology team.

These workflows included collecting and digitising data in the field, conducting phone surveys, enrolling Immunization Ambassadors, and triggering timely messages to caregivers. To reach a high volume of families, recruit ambassadors, and operate programs of this magnitude

In their partnerships with the governments of Maharashtra and Bihar, Suvita’s operations span a wide range of settings, including areas where internet connectivity can be unreliable. This creates additional operational and data challenges when collecting information and managing program workflows at scale.

Within this context, Suvita needed data tools like:

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

It was necessary that these 6 tools could be managed by an internal technical team of only 2 to 3 people. Suvita, therefore, required a data collection platform 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: A data system 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 seamless, near-real-time data systems and pipelines.

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 Immunization Ambassadors for their Ambassadors program. In order to conduct these complex surveys, they use SurveyCTO forms armed with:

Advanced skip logic
Repeat groups
Conditional branching

For these phone surveys, Suvita needs to capture detailed call metadata like exact durations of surveys, 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 Immunization 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 Field Officer captures a registry form, a SurveyCTO webhook sends the submission, including the register image, directly to Suvita’s backend API code. The code then creates the required records in Suvita’s database and assigns these records to Data Entry Officers for completion of data entry. The records are then picked up by Suvita’s self-hosted data entry application via which the Data Entry Officers enter the data.
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 the database, with data subsequently flowing into Suvita’s reporting system, which includes Google Looker 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 Reminders program.

Suvita plans to continue using SurveyCTO’s suite of 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.