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 also took a very deep dive into what makes a good and bad indicator, and how to avoid common indicator pitfalls at the designing stage.

The biggest improvement in DevResults was the departure of Pito and the arrival of our new MultiMatrix tool as part of our data visualization updates. MultiMatrix surpasses Pito’s functionality: you can now show and hide totals, aggregate by fiscal or calendar year, view percent to target analysis, create reports with disaggregated data with a single click, and save your reports as dashboards. We’ve also made MultiMatrix and Dashboards available to all users and added a tile that lets you view how well you’re doing against your targets.

We’re committed to making it easy to import and export information from your site and to integrate DevResults with other software. As part of this effort, we’re proud to announce our brand new API documentation. We’ve tried to make APIs accessible to non-technical users with step-by-step instructions on how to get started with APIs. We’ve also added new tools to download narrative responses and download all linked columns from a data table.

On the data entry side, we’ve added support to data tables so you can include hyperlinks, add tags, choose which sheet from a multi-sheet Excel file to upload, and more clearly display yes/no information.

Throughout all our work, we aim to improve how users interact with DevResults. Here are just some of the things you can now do in DevResults:

• Import program info more easily
• Assign indicators to results framework objectives via upload
• Rename locations, awarding organizations, partner organizations, indicator result comments, and sectors. Interested in making these changes to your site? Send a note to help@devresults.com!
• Search by user and organization in your change log
• Use the USAID color palette for data visualizations

We’ve also made some changes behind-the-scenes, including updating the user interface for data entry grids and improving the labels on graphs.

If you use DevResults for IATI reporting, you’ll have noticed we’ve now added support for several new elements, including the @humanitarian flag and scope, ‘Target Groups’ description, and participating organization IDs.

Finally, we also work non-stop to make sure DevResults is as secure as possible. Just a few things that we’ve completed this year:

• The password reset process is more secure
• The permissions for interacting with an activity are more consistent
• Enterprise users can now automatically access linked sites

If you would like to chat about any of these updates, please send an email to help@devresults.com and we’ll schedule a meeting. We hope you have a great 2021 and we look forward to working with you!