Using field expertise and targeted market and demographic surveys, ikapadata (Pty) Ltd of South Africa publishes key data on South Africa’s ever changing, expanding and shifting semi-urban townships. They also achieve positive social impact through targeting local disadvantaged youth for training and employment. They’ve killed their clipboards, recycled their surveys and become quicker, more efficient and accurate.
They did it with iFormBuilder.
To keep up with this dynamic landscape, ikapadata runs nation-wide surveys in the townships every two weeks using Android devices and iFormBuilder to replace their cumbersome and inefficient clipboards and physical surveys. Enhancing their work is ikapadata’s partnership with non-profit organization IkamvaYouth, who helps them hire promising youth from poor backgrounds living in the neighborhoods and townships where their surveys are taking place. Ethical business practice is an important part of their business.
Utilizing Android, Utilizing Speed, Saving Paper
ikapadata was a company searching for a way to quickly and efficiently conduct surveys in a dynamic environment that required near instantaneous turn around. For efficiency and flexibility in the South African mobile market, ikapadata needed a cross platform system utilizing Android devices. With iFormBuilder’s new Android platform, they were able to roll out devices and turn around surveys quicker and with greater accuracy than before.
“The strongest point of iFormBuilder is flexibility.”
But with iFormBuilder, ikapadata not only found that their surveys came back quicker and more accurate, they also were able to utilize the flexible and varied data streams offered by the platform to view near real time data in the field, providing their team with up to date information as it happened and speeding up delivery of their data considerably. Using this flexible data access to RSS and XML feeds ikapadata was able to ensure quality through real time data checks and instantly updating databases.
“Mobile data collection with iFormBuilder allows us to achieve an extremely quick turn-around of data from designing the questionnaire to having the final dataset from up to 1500 respondents within three weeks.” — Amrik Cooper, Co-Director, ikapadata
Along with their own regular market research published in weekly digests, ikapadata allows for clients to design their own targeted surveys. This process was considerably sped up through the use of the iFormBuilder platform. Allowing a process that took weeks before to be near real time with the ability to push surveys out to workers in the field that was designed just hours before.
“From designing the forms to accessing the data it provides the user with many useful options and features. In our case it enables us to give each client the specific solution for a specific task, thus increasing the quality and efficiency of our research surveys.” — Jan Schenk, Co-Director ikapadata
