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 »

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 »

“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 »

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 »

What's next with GDPR?

On May 23, DevResults hosted a discussion on the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In partnership with Sonjara and SurveyCTO, we wanted to bring together our clients, partners, and the international development community to discuss GDPR and its implications for the community as a whole. With just two days to go before the law came into effect, the room was a mixture of stress, excitement, and uncertainty. Our »

GDPR, DevResults, and You

You’ve probably received a dozen emails in the past few weeks from companies letting you know that they’ve updated their privacy policies and terms of service. The impetus for this is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) -- an EU regulation that seeks to protect the privacy of individuals -- which comes into effect on May 25. Why is this important? The new regulation means organizations (private, public, »

2017 Retrospective

At the start of 2017, we laid out a fairly ambitious roadmap for the year. At a high level, we wanted to increase the usefulness of DevResults beyond the realm of M&E: to make it accessible, usable, and useful for a broader swath of users. To that end, we targeted improvements in two areas: data visualization and granular data collection (data tables). This is the majority of what »

2016 Retrospective

2016 was an interesting year for us at DevResults. It was the first year that we laid out a transparent, public roadmap, and so for the first time I get to report back to you on how we measured up against these original targets. Quick Summary We added more communication check-ins with clients and have used these to better inform our own decisions. Due to the complexity of the projects »

Bulk Editing & Summer 2016 Developments

We're pleased to announce the launch of our bulk editing tool for Activities and Indicators. Here's a few details on how it works, as well as some smaller changes in DevResults that you may not have noticed, including new formula and data table indicator diagnostics! Bulk Editing Activities & Indicators This year, we've been working to provide more functionality for site administrators to streamline common actions, like our work to »

Bulk Imports

When we released the new index pages in December, we added bulk import of new activities, organizations, and locations and promised you bulk import of new indicators. Well, the time has come--we now have a bulk import tool for new indicators, too! To celebrate, we wanted to give you a refresher on how to use the bulk import tools for all index pages. 1 When/Why Would I Want to »

March 2016 Developments

Our biggest news for March and April is the launch of our beta testing program for major new features. Here's a full round-up of what we've been working on since my last blog post. 1 Beta Testing of Major New Features As we threatened in our 2016 vision blog post, we are beginning to release major new features for beta testing before we make them standard in your DevResults site. »

Early Spring 2016 Developments

Though we're hard at work on bigger projects, we have pushed out a few smaller changes that I wanted to be sure you knew about, including the return of left-hand filters to the index pages, some permissions adjustments, and more helpful indicator dashboard widgets. Here are the details. 1 Index Pages: Left-hand filters are back! Two months ago, we rolled out our leaner, faster-performing index pages. While most of you »

2015 Retrospective

The last year saw a lot of changes here at DevResults, and in good M&E fashion we've decided to review a lot of that to craft our strategy and focus for calendar year 2016. Overall, 2015 was a year of internal change for us--new staff, systematizing a lot of our support and work processes, and technical infrastructure changes. All of these have been iterative processes, and we wanted »

Autumnal Developments

In the last two months, we've made a number of changes to DevResults, but the truth is you may not have noticed them. Unlike previous blog posts about shiny new functionality or user interface changes, this post is a lot about what we've been doing behind the scenes to make DevResults better, from architectural changes to streamlining scheduled tasks and processes. But before I jump into that, just a little »

August Developments

Here's a summary of the major updates we've rolled out in the last month. 1 Indicator Definition Page Overhaul Yes, I wrote an entire other blog post about this because there are so many changes. Be sure to check it out: improved formula editor, data table mapping interface, warnings when things won't work properly, and more! 2 Data Table Locking I teased you with this in last month's blog post »

July Developments

As most of you know, we're a small but dedicated group of people, and we are constantly working to improve DevResults, but we know you don't always find out about those improvements right away. We're working to change that by communicating medium and major changes to you on this blog. In the last few weeks, here's what we've been up to: 1 New default messaging behavior for Activity's submission/return/ »