Catholic Relief Services: CommCare as a Global Solution for iNGOs

Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is an international aid organization that runs programs in more than 100 countries, supported by more than 5,000 employees. CRS’s programs are deployed in the world’s most resource-constrained settings, and many programs involve both frontline service delivery and community-level data capture for monitoring and evaluation.

Evaluating CommCare

Prior to CommCare, CRS leveraged a tool for frontline surveying across many of their country teams. However, users found that this tool was too complex for self-service usage and too inflexible for the wide variety of use cases across CRS’s portfolio of work. The result was limited usage and – in cases where teams did choose to use the platform – slow time-to-deploy.

Looking for a solution to these challenges, Steve Hellen, Director of ICT4D at CRS, and his team of ICT specialists began a detailed evaluation of mobile application and survey platforms. After a multi-month process, Steve’s team chose CommCare as their preferred solution due to its flexibility to handle a wide range of use cases, from one-time surveys to long-term case management.

“CommCare is tailored to the international development sector. This is critical for CRS: The evidence base for global health is huge—that’s very unique among tech vendors, even in this sector—and CommCare’s data workflows align well with how our M&E teams look at data.”

Steve Hellen, Director of ICT4D at CRS

Additionally, Steve’s team found that because CommCare is tailored to the international development market, many of the features were directly relevant to the CRS teams he supported, as was the evidence base of third-party research on the platform’s impact in global health settings.

After deciding CommCare was the best fit for their programs, CRS deployed the platform as their officially preferred tool for frontline surveys, complex longitudinal data workflows, and service delivery. CRS’s global ICT4D team pays for CommCare, meaning program teams in any given country can deploy CommCare for free.

“CommCare alleviates the learning curve required to capture and manage complex data.”

Taralyn Lyon, MEAL Advisor at CRS

This setup has greatly increased the ability of smaller programs to leverage world-class data tools, while enabling CRS’s large programs with a very high level of technical CommCare support. Today, more than 250 CRS programs leverage CommCare.

CRS also deploys CommCare alongside Power BI as their preferred analytics and reporting solution. Such intentional standardization around these two tools, which integrate seamlessly, translates to substantial country-level capacity from community-level data capture through analysis and reporting.

A Multi-Tiered Support Structure

CRS’s CommCare deployment involved three unique levels of support that greatly aid global adoption and use of mobile data collection:

Service Desk

CRS offers all their country teams a globally-available service for all software-related queries. This Service Desk Team acts as the first line of support for teams with questions about CommCare. They are empowered to execute basic tasks like project administration, but they share issues with the ICT4D Support Team for anything beyond basic queries.

ICT4D Support Team

CRS maintains an internal team of CommCare experts within the global ICT4D group. These specialists are practiced in both technical CommCare skills and program needs, including data capture, monitoring, and evaluation for CRS’s MEAL efforts. The ICT4D Support Team fields requests that cannot be handled by the Service Desk and works to proactively build capacity in country teams to aid in the efficiency of program deployment when using CommCare.

Direct line to Dimagi’s CS and Account Management team

Whenever questions go beyond the responsibilities of the Service Desk and ICT4D Support Team, CRS has a direct line of communication to Dimagi’s CommCare teams, including Customer Success and Account Managers. This relationship ensures that any high priority issues are quickly resolved and that CRS’s internal IT roadmap can be closely aligned with Dimagi’s CommCare roadmap.

The benefits of going global

Because CRS chose to deploy CommCare as their globally-preferred solution for mobile data collection and case management, they have been able to unlock unique value in their country programs. Most importantly, CRS has seen amazing strides in the digital capacity of their distributed teams. Director of ICT4D, Steven Hellen, outlined the distinct benefits of their approach:

Simplicity for Everyone

CommCare provides an easy-to-use, self-service tool for CRS’s country teams, enabling them to manage application development and deployment largely on their own. “Teams can get a lot out of CommCare without too much training when you’re deploying it for relatively simple workflows” says Steve Hellen. On more complex projects where technical support is required, that support is readily available via CRS’s Service Desk and ICT4D Support Teams.

A Global Standard

Supporting a single solution across all of their programs has empowered CRS to build CommCare capacity across nearly every level of their agency:

Local Capacity

Many of CRS’s country teams, comprised of M&E Officers and Program Managers, are already familiar with how to deploy mobile apps with CommCare. This decreases the time-to-deploy of new mobile apps, while also drastically decreasing the support burden for their IT team.

Internal Experts

Because they are supporting a limited suite of tools, the ICT4D team is able to become experts in those products. They serve as subject matter experts across the agency, from working with business development to demonstrating the value of CommCare and mobile tech in project proposal and program design. They also gain experience through advisory services, support, and capacity building for program implementation and maintenance.

Powerful Security and Administration

By using a single tool, CRS was able to retain greater administrative control around users and project spaces. This included permissions and access by user, but also project-level management.

Enterprise Dashboard

The administrator-level dashboard has offered CRS visibility into the hundreds of project spaces in their domain. They can monitor overall usage, including form submissions and mobile / web user information from one centralized dashboard. In addition, they have the ability to adjust certain Enterprise Settings, like restricting project space creation from users with an @crs.org email address. The dashboard also allows the team to see any problems in one place – from low usage rates to broken forms – allowing them to triage their issues and prioritize within their support structure.

Central Billing

By supporting CommCare across the organization, projects that otherwise would not have the budget or capacity to handle the subscription on their own are able to realize the benefits of mobile data collection and service delivery tools on their own projects. This means that on a per project basis, Enterprise partners can end up paying significantly less than if they supported each project individually.