Hi!
This feature is extremely valuable for us
I work in an Latin-American ONG called TECHO (currently in 19 countries with a team of 5000 people), we work in slums with volunteers, our main program it's the construction of emergency housing.
In order to do that, we survey families asking about their housing and living situation. We usually need at least two surveys for each family to understand if our program would have a positive impact for that case.
We usually have many more families applying that we could actually help, so we have to decide which families we are going to work with.
This is what we wish we could do:
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Before going to a community: a volunteer does pre-field work selecting families that need to have their situation updated (maybe the previous survey was incomplete, has risen doubts or has been done a long time ago). Downloads all this data to the mobile device.
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In the community, before talking to the family. The volunteer searches the previous survey (offline), reads it and pre-loads a new survey response with that previous data.
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Once with the family, in a conversation, all the necessary information is asked again to update or clarify. When all the information is updated the new response is sent.
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Back from the community: the volunteer should be able to see the updated data for those families. (Extra: can also see previous versions of that survey to understand how it has developed over time).
With the all the families situation updated, we select families to work with for the next construction event.
We've been using kobotoolbox for collecting data. Not having a feature for managing cases have been a pain point to manage all this information. This feature would allow us to liberate our volunteers of typing data from paper surveys and crunching data in multiple google docs, and freeing them to focus on the social work.
Context: Constructions are big events done as a weekend activity (5 times a year) were a massive amount of volunteers go to a community and join a beneficiary family to help them build their emergency housing donated by TECHO.