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Background
ZING provides investment and support to youth projects in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa. They have committed to funding a series of improvements to CiviCRM with a particular focus on:
- mobile interface - smart phone and SMS
- offline access
- monitoring and evaluation tools
ZING is funding these improvements to CiviCRM so that the projects they support have better access to tools which will help them become more effective. It is expected that various ZING projects will provide a significant amount of guidance / use cases to develop this functionality.
This page aims to give an overview and flavour of all ZING projects. Particular projects will have their own pages which will be referenced from here.
Mobile interface
A number of ZING clients operate 'in the field' and need to collect data whilst on the move. A mobile interface that allows them to add data directly to their CRM would improve their data collection workflows.
Use cases
RD and FutureFirst could both provide use solid cases here. This should include a workflow, the amount and type of data that needs to be collected, how it is collected and the reports / analysis of the final data.
Requirements
- Workflows to assist with the running of surveys, collecting information on the move
- High usability data collection interface to collect data on the move
- Data collection via SMS.
- Data collected can be exported to other systems using open standards and interfaces. Many ZING partners have already existing CRMs that are used for reporting / monitoring / analysis.
Integration with existing tools
- A fair amount of work is going into CiviMobile at the current sprint in the Netherlands and planning on CiviMobile phase 2. There is also the beginnings of a CiviMobile Specification
- CiviCampaign / Survey / Petition is focussed on collecting data from an "end user".
Potential collaboration
- De Goede Woning and NYSS for mobile functionality
- PowerBase for SMS integration as described in Texting in CiviCRM.
- RapidSMS, Ushahidi and OpenDataKit for SMS and offline survey capabilities.
Next steps
- RD and Place2Be to flush out use cases
- ZING Partners to deploy CiviCRM and try out existing data collection and survey functionality.
- CiviCRM to expand on specs and start Make It Happen Campaigns on Mobile and SMS
- CiviCRM to evaluate the above open source projects and figure out integration points
- CiviCRM to scope out Mobile and SMS project and launch MIH for 4.2 with ZING and other partners.
Offline access
Some ZING projects work in areas where the internet connection can be very flaky and liable to stop working for extended periods of time. This prevents an obvious problem with web based CRM. Having their CRM become inaccessible for extended periods of time is debilitating for the organisation. Developing a a fully fledged offline CiviCRM is beyond the scope of this project. Rather, the emphasis is on implementing a crucial subset of functionality.
Use cases
- RD has two country offices in Uganda and Sierra Leone with very sporadic internet access. HopeHIV have offices in areas with similar connectivity issues.
Next steps
- Work out more detailed requirements. RD can help shape this project and help us understand which areas of functionality are critical.
- MM random thought: one possible solution is a read only copy of the database. An rsynced mysqldump is pretty low bandwidth after the first dump.
Monitoring and evaluation reports
ZING see the mobile interface primarily as a tool for data collection. Once collected, they want to analyse this data.
Use cases
Which Zing partners?
Requirements
A set of out of the box reports to provide analyse of data
impact reports (MM)
Ask the same questions / set of questions to a client group and two points in time and analyse the delta between the first and second time, i.e. how many people report greater level of well-being after having attended a course. The Charity Evaluation service might provide useful background here: http://www.ces-vol.org.uk/index.cfm?pg=416
Next steps
- ZING partners to provide use cases and more details M+E / reporting.
1 Comment
Hide/Show CommentsJan 27, 2012
Michael McAndrew
Hi folks,
As I find out more about Zing's interests and requirements for different projects that we are scoping out (which we'll post here once we have them in draft form) I think that there are some improvements that we need to make to CiviSurvey to support this work (and we haven't made these explicit yet in the brief).
At the moment, AFAIK, CiviSurvey functionality is primarily offline / backend. i.e. someone who has admin access to civicrm can survey people. This is designed to support things like phonebanking and walklists. But there is not currently, any self service survey workflow, i.e. ask these 30 people to fill in a survey about their experiences.
ATM, there are two ways you can collect this data in a self service way: using a combination of CiviMail and profiles or CiviMail and CiviPetition. We'll use these methods in the mean time, but I don't think that either of them is a proper long term solution.
I think that the good solution for Zing is to fund development of CiviSurvey so it supports a self service workflow.
I know this is kind of covered in Zing's funding of CiviSMS and of CiviMobile (for Data capture), and also above in M+E reports, but I think that if we don't make improvements to CiviSurvey (or something similar) more explicit and high level, we are in danger of letting some things slip through the gaps.
Would be good to get people's thoughts on this.
Michael