It is December 2nd 2014, in a small town outside of Mysore, India. Jose – a member of our India team – is invited inside for a conversation. He sits down, pulls out his tablet, and begins the same intentional dialogue that he has had with countless others in the area. Mahadevamma, a mother and the proud owner of the home, had taken out a loan for a water connection from one of our partners three months earlier to the day. She is 56 years young, runs a household of four and is one of the more than 900,000 women around the world to have received a loan from a Water.org partner.

However, this conversation was different, for what Mahadevamma did not know was that she was marking the dawn of a new data collection era at Water.org. As their conversation ended, Jose calmly powered off his tablet. The days of paper surveys were waning and the first digital household borrower survey via mWater was complete.

Today, we have a lot more information on Mahadevamma, her loan and her new water connection.

More importantly, it’s only a few clicks away. Mahadevamma’s information lives on mWater, where we can quickly and easily export it into Excel for in-depth manual analysis or simply view it displayed in lucid, auto-generated charts and graphs.

If we use the dashboards feature, we can compare her survey with the nearly two thousand others in our system, or apply a few filters and use the same dashboard to compare her answers to other women from southern India, ages 50 through 60, who also took out a loan for a piped water connection. Identifying trends, data collection errors and key learnings across all of our programs and geographies has never been easier.

If Water.org were still using paper surveys today, the analysis and validation of our data mentioned above likely wouldn’t happen as quickly. Instead, piles of our surveys would be reprehensibly locked away in a metal file cabinet somewhere awaiting analysis by busy staff only to be occasionally pulled out for those rare cases of “damage control,” or a compulsory annual review. This is why we chose to make the shift to mobile data collection.

Locations of recent borrower surveys:

We wanted our data to be actionable, ensuring all of our day-to-day monitoring efforts resulted in a proactive response, affording the opportunity to apply learnings and make adjustments to our programs in real time.

Nearly two years later we are now using mWater more robustly in our ongoing monitoring efforts. In 8 countries spanning Latin America, Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, both our U.S. and in-country staff are wielding tablets to conduct household borrower surveys and monitoring visits to the head and branch offices of our partners. These three different surveys allow us to verify the information that our partners are reporting to us and also allow us to easily collaborate with our partners – making adjustments to a program, sharing key learnings and reporting back to them on their performance.

These surveys also allow us to uncover internal learnings that can inform the design of future programs and some of our policies. In fact, with our Borrower Surveys in mWater, we have recently been able to form a more robust and informed loan disqualification and loan diversion policy within our organization.

So what is next for mWater at Water.org?

With the success of the platform thus far, we have recently decided to begin using mWater in our evaluation efforts as well. Working with third party researchers, Water.org is now conducting impact assessments digitally. We hope this shift will expedite our baseline and endline studies, making the data collection and analysis phases quicker and more agile, and allow us to better monitor the progress and quality of our third parties’ data collection processes.

The Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning team at Water.org could have selected a number of different mobile data collection platforms. However, the collaborative spirit and open-access business model created by co-founders Annie, John and Clayton piqued our interest from the start. In addition to the draw of contributing to a platform that would help our fellow NGOs improve their M&E practices across the WASH sector, the user-friendly interface and self-empowering build out of mWater solidified our choice. And, based on this post, we think it’s abundantly clear that we are confident we made the right one.