70% faster surveys, one source of data truth: How Women for Women transformed their field ops with Resco

Women for Women is a global NGO committed to supporting women, their families, and their communities through training and advocacy programs. Their work in contexts of poverty, violence against women, and recent / ongoing conflicts is supported by over 400 employees across 9 international offices. Since 1993, Women for Women International has invested in the power of over 500,000 forgotten women to learn the skills they need to rebuild their families and communities. 

Business challenge:

Global conflict does not limit itself based on internet connectivity, field servers, or private Wi-Fi networks. That’s why global aid organizations cannot limit their impact by these factors either.

In the case of Women for Women, their existing mobile forms and legacy SQL server was limiting their ability to sync data quickly and accurately. Not only was their data sync limited, but they experienced sporadic data loss – often losing entire personal records collected same day.

“You’re supposed to enroll 25 women in a group, then you come back to the office to discover some people are nowhere to be found. So you have to go back in the field and re-enroll.”

Christy Alagbe, Women for Women Nigeria

And with the impact of their efforts regularly funded by grants and other global programs, Women for Women rely on the right data in the right context to continue their mission. Not to mention, they collect this data in remote, often isolated locations which require complete functionality without any online connection.

Women for Women turned to Salesforce for their new CRM, but they still were missing the right tool to take their field operations offline, build intelligent mobile forms, and contextualize their data. This created a bottleneck across multiple teams costing hours of tedious manual labor – they knew something had to change.

Solution:

After evaluating 14 different solutions, Women for Women decided Resco was the best solution to solve their connectivity, data collection & analysis, and CRM sync woes. They then turned to long-time Resco Partner, Higgins One, to explore Resco functionality and develop their MVP.

“We aim to create technical solutions that are globally streamlined and locally effective to serve millions of women sustainably. After evaluating 14 solutions, Resco stood out for its product maturity, value, offline reliability, modern features, development, customer success stories, multilingual support, integrations, and end-user experience.”

Matias Averbuj, Director of Global Business Solutions

Now with a complete solution fully integrated with their existing Salesforce CRM and Power BI Dashboards, Women for Women has been able to take full advantage of Resco’s capabilities across a variety of desktop and mobile use cases – even developing separate experiences for office and field experts respectively.  

“With Resco, you can use a mobile device like you are using the desktop device. That also improves data quality in the field, because whatever I can see on the desktop or on the laptop, I can also see it on a tablet or a mobile device.”

Daniel Udeh, Women for Women Nigeria

Today, Women for Women leverages Resco’s offline and data collection tools globally, with plans to expand more functionality and freedom to independent country teams.

“Resco is a flexible, powerful tool that readily integrates with Salesforce, one of the most commonly used CRM platforms. It is highly suitable for offline and complex data collection, is easy to get set-up, and has an accessible price.”

Matias Averbuj, Director of Global Business Solutions

Outcome & benefits:                                      

In the field, Women for Women has reduced the time to complete surveys by 70% on average with Resco – alongside full functionality in offline environments. Not only has the survey completion time reduced, but average survey data processing time has been reduced from a week of manual tasks to less than one day. Resco’s offline database and intelligent forms allow for quicker participant lookup and the minimizing of duplicate records compared to the spreadsheets of the past. And in the case of Women for Women, more efficiency in the field means more direct support and resources to those that need it most.

“I forgot to sample a group in the field, so I took out my iPhone. I have the Resco app there, and in three minutes I sample the group and sync. Voila, they had their data. That’s when I knew this is something that’s working”

Rebar Mohammed, Women for Women International

Healthier data from the field means Women for Women also benefits from clearer and more impactful data analysis. Thanks to Resco’s stable and lightning-fast sync engine, many global offices report drastically improved data loss with many offices reporting 0% data loss. And with much of their program efficacy reliant on grants and additional funding, Women for Women now has a crystal-clear view of grant tracking & qualification to drive even more aid.

“We have a clear source of truth in place, that we can always relate to anyone when clarity is needed. We can more quickly and more precisely track down information to get to the bottom of program issues that may arise in real-time.”

Abigail Hobart, MERL Coordinator

Looking ahead, Resco’s flexibility and offline capability provides Women for Women enough technological autonomy to begin localizing processes and creating more independence for local offices.

“We were surprised at how open Resco was at hearing our needs and desires for improvements to the software. They very quickly made all the changes that we wanted, and included most of our suggestions in their work plan.”

Sebastian Schurmann, Global Data Manager