Track Your Metrics : Changing the way social programs are tracked and financed

Overview

‘Track Your Metrics – TYM’ is a product by Outline India that consists of an all – in – one web based platform and android application. It is a data collection app which helps in formulating goal oriented surveys. With its easy to use visualisation and reporting features, its one of the most convenient tools available in this space.

Task in hand

• We had to build a solution which worked equally well in rural parts of India as well as in metro cities.
• We had to create apps for data collection which would be as easy to use as whatsapp is for chatting.
• The field staff, more often than not, do not have reliable data connections on their devices to collect the data in rural India, which necessitated a solution that has the ability to collect data without any internet connection as well.
• In the Indian context, data collection is a herculean task owing to the language diversity the country has, sometimes languages used in a region change within few kilometres.
• Data collection is more impactful when questions can be customised based on respondents’ responses, hence the apps needed to have an ability to create complex skip and relevance conditions while building these questionnaires.

Solutions

• We first broke the app into two parts, one web application and the other mobile application.
• Mobile application was created because the data collection would be conducted in field so it would be easy to carry and use. People are used to the mobile phones, which would make it easier for the teams to collect data on the go.
• Mobile application was designed to ensure all question formats and taking responses remains intuitive.
• In the mobile application, we created a local database to store data when the device did not have an active internet connection. This was particularly useful while data collection was done in remote areas with poor network connectivity.
• Web application had third party integrations with translation APIs which helped in changing language of surveys and questionnaires on the go.
• TYM mobile app has an ability to sync data stored in its local database as soon as it detects an internet connection.
• A graphical user interface was created to add skip logics to questions without having to write complex codes in excel sheets.
• Intelligent analytics was used to enable better reporting and analysis of data collected.

Outcome

We ensured easier and quicker impact assessment at low costs, encouraging the benefactors to expand their reach and scale-up their activities/projects. TYM in its current avatar helps monitor projects and measure the impact of the work done in various social programs. The web platform and the app majorly consists of four components: survey formulation facility on the web-based platform that comprises of a survey bank consisting of standardised, field tested surveys drawn from the works of sectoral leaders, international and national organisations as well as the government ; an android app to facilitate offline data collection, even in the remotest of areas; a data visualisation dashboard on the platform for simplistic representation of the data collected to showcase metrics; culminating into a report generation template that would allow users to create customisable reports on the web platform.

TYM has ensured that technology becomes an enabler for increased accountability. It is bringing in accountability across the development world, thereby changing the way we track and finance social programs.