Impact Delivery Community Gatherings: Erin Quinn’s Honest Advice for Digital Programs

In the fall of 2023, we kicked off a series of live community gatherings designed to support implementing partners on their digital transformation journeys. No sales pitch, no slides, just audience questions and honest answers from Erin Quinn, Dimagi’s Head of Customer Success. Hosted by Partnerships Director Rishabh Rath, the format was simple: bring real questions about choosing, implementing, and sustaining digital tools, and Erin would give the real, on-the-record answers she would give a partner.

Event #1, August 30, 2023, How to choose a digital tool that lasts

The first gathering focused on the upstream decisions, what to consider when assessing digital tools, what makes stakeholders actually use dashboards, and how to design for sustainability in low-resource contexts.

Questions Erin answered live:

• What should I consider when assessing various digital tools to digitize a program?
• What is key to getting stakeholders to systematically use digital dashboards to monitor and adapt their programming?
• How can digital design be made sustainable in a low economic and social structure?
• What is technology sustainability, and how can it be unsustainable?

Event #2, September 27, 2023, Strategies for customer success and data quality

The second gathering shifted from selection to implementation: triage strategies for customer success, data quality (and case sensitivity), and how to think about program implementation with sustainability in mind from day one.

Questions Erin answered live:

• Could you share any strategies for customer success and methods for triaging?
• Is there any way to verify data quality, and is CommCare case sensitive?
• Can you speak to the digitalization of community engagement interventions for health promotion?
• How should we be thinking about program implementation with sustainability in mind from the very beginning?

What we took away

Across both sessions, a few themes repeated. Sustainability is a design choice as much as a budget line. Stakeholder buy-in to dashboards comes from making the dashboard answer their question, not from training. And customer success is less about a triage matrix and more about closing the loop with partners early, before small frustrations harden into the wrong conclusion.