2023 Q1 - The Ramp Up

DevResults started 2022 focused on supporting our partners, protecting their data, increasing our technical investments, and building useful and impactful features. But the sophomore year of COVID-19 came with new challenges and opportunities for growth. At the top of this year, we reflected on our successes and learning edges: systemizing what worked and ideating on how we could improve. With the end of Q1 approaching, we’d like to share »

DevResults is on the FedRAMP Marketplace!

What has twenty thumbs and received FedRAMP authorization in the last year? That’s right. It’s DevResults. Our team has worked tirelessly over the last year to undergo rigorous security testing and receive authorization from the U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. After many months of hard work — and with the support of our auditors, our agency colleagues, and the FedRAMP team — DevResults is officially FedRAMP authorized. »

2021-apalooza: Year in Review

As we enter the waning days of 2021, we wanted to take stock and share what we’ve been up to this year. On the main stage You may have already heard about some of our biggest releases this year: Index-like ‘choosers’ have been implemented across the site to give users better tools for selecting exactly what they want. Activity custom fields let you decide how you want to describe »

STOP Spillover Program Chooses DevResults

DevResults is pleased to announce support to USAID’s STOP Spillover to build the program’s digital monitoring system. In October 2020, USAID funded a five-year program to enhance the capacity of priority countries in Africa and Asia to reduce the risk of viral spillover from animal hosts to humans. Strategies to Prevent Spillover, or STOP Spillover, assists target countries to enhance country capacity to prevent and/or mitigate spillover »

Index-ify all the choosers!

Silly name, serious business. Today we’re releasing a new feature...that has existed for 10+ years: the DevResults Index, as you’ve never seen it before. DevResults users have long used index pages across the app — they provide lots of ways to narrow down your search to exactly what you're looking for. We've now adapted other selection tools in the app to match, expanding functionality while streamlining the interface. »

Securing Data in a Crisis

Protection of personally identifiable information (PII) is one of the most important responsibilities in M&E and a solemn duty of technology providers. As the situation deteriorated yesterday in Kabul, our team discussed what we could do to protect the people that our partners and software endeavor to serve. Our team reached out to every organization we work with that reports any data in Afghanistan and has applied the »

2020 Retrospective

We want to thank all of you for your incredible work throughout the many challenges of 2020. Here at DevResults, we focused on projects both big and small to make data collection, management, visualization, and usage more widely and easily available. To launch 2021, here’s a recap of updates you might have missed. Early last year, we took some time to share our training philosophy--both in-person and remote. We »

Integrations? We can help.

Over the past few months, we’ve done some serious spring cleaning — by southern hemisphere standards — of our API endpoints and documentation, all in an effort to make our API more user-friendly and accessible to our clients. [I’m sure that most of you reading this are already bored. Don’t stop reading just yet! There’s something here for everyone, whether you know what an API is or not! »

Sabbaticals, Projects, and Unexpected Storytelling with Data

Last year, DevResults instituted paid sabbaticals for employees with five years of service in order to expand our collective skills and reward long-term commitment. I was the third person in the company to take advantage of this personal and professional development opportunity and I’d like to share a bit of my experience with you. Motivations There’s always more than one reason to take a sabbatical. In my case, »

So long, Pito old friend

The Pito tool has been serving DevResults users’ data-pivoting needs for nearly seven years. With the release of Matrix and MultiMatrix earlier this year, we migrated all existing Pito reports to the Matrix format and redirected the links in our menus and Knowledge Base. Now it is time to bid our old friend Pito adieu. But before we say goodbye, we thought it a fitting tribute to reveal the origin »

The DevResults Guide to Best-in-Class Trainings

DevResults has been providing engaging, hands-on trainings for seven years. With thoughtful adaptation and continuous innovation, we’ve crafted effective and fun trainings, whether in-person or virtual. Below are our four core pillars of a successful training and how we translate them to an online setting. What are the hallmarks of an excellent training? Trainees learn by doing: Trainees should perform 100% of the skills they’ll need to acquire, »

Why Your Indicators are More Complicated than You Think

A blog post for anyone who writes indicators Contents: Percentages Percent Change Cumulative vs. Incremental Targets Cumulative vs. Incremental Actuals Disaggregation vs. Free Response Cross-Disaggregation vs. Parallel Disaggregation Deduplication Background In seven years as a data scientist at DevResults, I’ve worked with donor agencies, implementing partners, nonprofits, and private companies. I’ve had a front-row seat to M&E planning in the sectors of health and sanitation, education, »

“Can I speak to a human being please?”: Spotlight on the DevResults Helpdesk

Helpdesks are fairly ubiquitous nowadays, but you may still wonder who is waiting on the other end of help@devresults.com to answer your questions. The current DevResults Helpdesk is the result of dozens of iterations, and it is still very much a constantly evolving work-in-progress. So what can it do for you? Who staffs the support desk? DevResults maintains an on-call team comprising one software developer and one data »

A Growing DevResults Family

I just returned from parental leave following the birth of my second daughter. I was able to do so thanks to the generous support of my company, which offers (as a norm, not a limit) 12 weeks paid leave for employees that have a new baby at home or are experiencing some other life change that requires full-time attention. This is in addition to unlimited sick and vacation time, and »

Don't Repeat Yourself, Share Instead

Over the last decade, DevResults has invested time and resources into learning what best practices enable us to be a lean company while still supporting some of the biggest government agencies, implementing partners, and non-profits in the international development and humanitarian sector. Recently, my colleague released a blog post on how we have as a company have created a remote work culture that has been going strong for ten years. »

Tracking the global response to Covid-19 using DevResults and IATI

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a global initiative to improve the transparency of development and humanitarian resources and their results to address poverty and crises. Tracking the response to Covid-19 is no exception. Whether you’re required to publish IATI data by your donor or not, doing so is important, as we have learned from previous crises like the Ebola epidemic. Over ten years since its founding, IATI »

A formula to make compensation fair?

At DevResults, we've come to believe that conventional processes for setting salaries are not only arbitrary, but provide excellent hiding places for bias and prejudice—leading to gender and racial pay gaps. So we've decided to no longer negotiate salaries or raises. Instead, we use a spreadsheet model to calculate everyone's salary, based on their experience, education, and tenure. At our team retreat in February 2019, we decided that we »

Building Camaraderie While Working Remotely

We’ve previously mentioned how DevResults has worked from home for over a decade, but we wanted to share some of our secrets for building relationships and staying engaged with little to no in-person interaction. There are lots of fun and interesting ways to cultivate deeper relationships and gain shared understanding with your co-workers, even if you can’t have regular lunches or pizza parties. Here are some of our »

How DevResults has worked from home for over a decade

In the last ten years, DevResults has given trainings in over 20 countries and has attended conferences worldwide. But most of the time, the entire DevResults team works remotely. With many folks’ travel plans suspended and organizations instituting telework, we want to share the processes and tools we use on a day-to-day basis to maximize the benefits and minimize the downsides of working from home. For all internal meetings, use »

Your professional life goes beyond your full time job

DevResults is a great place to work. We have good pay; vacation and leave policies; the opportunity to work with smart, caring people; flexible hours and remote work; a product that we believe in; and the list goes on. But what if this is not enough? A high percentage of software engineers love contributing to open source software. Many enjoy having side projects where they can use different technologies, participate »

Upgrade Your Pivot Table Reports with MultiMatrix

Last year, we made significant improvements to indicator reports with our Matrix feature. This year, we've expanded it to work with multiple indicators! What's new? In addition to bringing the functionality you know and love to reports with multiple indicators, we added a few extra touches to make it easier than ever to make and share the reports you need. Disaggregation Category Combinations Ever need to make a report with »

Rename "Activity"

One of DevResults' most anticipated features is finally here. We can now rename the concept of an "activity" to anything you like. Whether you work with projects, programs, grants, offices, operating units, partners, awards, or teams, your DevResults site can reflect the terminology of your organization. Plus, your chosen term will be translated automatically for users who view the platform in another language. Two caveats: All help materials and training »

Notifications: Now in an Inbox Near You!

To Do: Celebrate. Due Date: Now. Details: Advanced notifications settings are here. DevResults site owners and administrators can now choose: What actions in each site trigger a notification, Which users receive notifications, and The frequency with which they receive these notifications. How do I use this? As a site administrator, you can now select what actions in your DevResults site warrant in-app or email notifications, including overdue checklist items, new »

Professional Development at DevResults

DevResults instituted a sabbatical policy earlier this year. We looked into types of sabbaticals across sectors and found a wide variety; for us, an employee earns 12 weeks to focus on professional development for every five years of service. In light of this policy, I’m excited to share that I’ll be attending a programming course from June 24th to October 4th. What this means for you: In the »

How a Suggestion Becomes a Feature

DevResults prides itself on continuous innovation in response to our users’ needs. Every improvement we make is a response to the feedback we get in person and through our help desk. As our company grows, DevResults works constantly to optimize our own internal processes. We strive for transparency in how we evaluate and execute feature suggestions, and this blog post will offer a peek behind the curtain of our feature »