DevResults provides unlimited document and photo storage, and many clients love this feature. But for those of you who already have existing document storage solutions, never fear! We're excited to introduce our latest feature: the ability to connect your Dropbox account to your DevResults site. 1 Why Would I Use It? Bottom line: it lets you keep using the Dropbox structure you're used to while also exposing that in DevResults, »

We're always working to make DevResults easier to understand and use. Last year we released our Something's Wrong tool to make it easier to report bugs or ask questions from within your DevResults site. Now we are proud to unveil our latest tool to help you use DevResults better: the Help Menu. This makes a lot of our help site resources available from within DevResults. The best thing about it? »

Reporting Cycles will let you more easily assign different reporting frequencies to your indicators, like having some indicators report annually and some report quarterly. 1 How Does It Work? Reporting Cycles contain Reporting Periods. A quarterly Reporting Cycle contains all of your quarterly Reporting Periods; an annual Reporting Cycle contains all of your annual Reporting Periods. You can view and manage Reporting Cycles under Administration > Reporting Cycles. Reporting Periods are »

While we've been collecting beta-tester feedback on the Reporting Cycles feature, we've still been working on other site improvements. Reporting Cycles will actually come to your DevResults site near the end of this month, but I wanted to keep you posted on some smaller changes we've rolled out since my last blog post. 1 Updated Activity Reporting Period Page We've been slowly overhauling and rewriting many pages on the site »

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 »

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. »

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 was a year of big changes for us. Previously, we'd been a hybrid company doing a combination of web development and DevResults. At the start of 2015, we officially closed the consulting branch of the business to focus exclusively on DevResults. With this identity change, we experimented with changes to a lot of processes and workflows that we'd been itching to fix but hadn't had the time or humanpower »

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 »

Open-source software is an amazing phenomenon. But it's not the answer for international development, any more than it is in any other field. I love open-source software. I'm writing this blog post in Ghost, an open-source blogging platform, using Google Chrome, a (mostly) open-source browser built on top of the open-source Blink engine. Ghost runs on Node.js, which is also open source. The DevResults app is built using open-source »

DevResults is a bootstrapped software company, meaning we’re funded only by our revenue. In almost every way, this has been a dream come true. The independence has granted us the freedom to define how we work and what we work on. Most importantly, we’ve been able to focus on helping our clients, instead of meeting investor expectations. But bootstrapping has its disadvantages. Since our start in 2004, we’ »

Most of you are familiar with Pito, our query tool for viewing indicator performance data. I'd like to introduce you to Pito's new little brother: Single Indicator Pito. For an individual indicator, the Reports tab has always contained three things: a choropleth map, an actuals vs. targets chart, and a results grid. As many of you have noted, the results grid was pretty limited in how you could arrange and »

We're proud to announce the unveiling of our new, improved Index pages. These are the pages that list all of your activities, all of your indicators, etc. We completely rewrote these from scratch to get you improved performance, a cleaner interface, and a whole bunch of perks. The new pages are considerably faster, the filters/search are much more responsive and user-friendly, you can now create new activities in bulk, »

We're pleased to announce our newest feature: custom queries. Working with one of our Data Scientists, you can define a custom layout for some DevResults information in Excel. We'll write the query and save it directly in your site, and you can run it whenever you need it. Here's what you need to know about the feature. 1 Why Would I Need It? Sometimes, you need to see info in »

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 »

We just completed a migration of all of our help documentation to a new platform. Here's what you need to know about the change. The more things change, the more they stay the same. You'll keep accessing it using the same trusted url (http://help.devresults.com), and all the same content is there, just in a smoother interface. New landing page The significant difference you'll see is the site's »

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 »

We're proud to announce the unveiling of our new, improved Indicator Definition page. The Indicator Definition page contains a lot of the rules and logic that dictate how DevResults calculates and displays indicator performance data. So updating this page touched many corners in the site and prompted us to overhaul all kinds of behind-the-scenes calculations and logic. We're intensely proud of how much more user-friendly the page is now, and »

We're working to make DevResults easier to understand and use. Our newest feature is the Diagnostics panel. Don't see what you're expecting in DevResults? This page should be your first stop. It highlights potential problems with your configuration. It doesn't find every problem yet, but we're going to keep working on every configuration warning you might need. For now, here's what you need to know to start using it: 1 »

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/ »

DevResults is used all around the world by many different kinds of people. In each of those places, the reason people use our software is to make the world a better place. Some DevResults users are working in their own countries; others have moved to unfamiliar places. All have dedicated their careers to making a difference, one way or another. But making the world a better place is hard. There »

Aid transparency is not an end in itself: It is a means towards an end. Transparency leads to greater accountability, and accountability leads to greater effectiveness. The donors and others who are committing to publish data are, in effect, agreeing to be held accountable: Accountable to each other, and ultimately accountable to the citizens in the recipient countries and to the taxpayers in donor countries. The International Aid Transparency Initiative »

We're in the process of adding import and export support for the IATI XML format to DevResults. Although IATI is primarily conceived as a public transparency standard (hence the T), many organizations are beginning to see it as a promising interchange format for reporting results — either outbound reporting (to a funder, or to a home office) or inbound reporting (from a grantee or contractor). However, the IATI standard currently »

At DevResults, we are committed to providing you with the best possible tool. It has to be fast, accurate and easy to use. But just like international development, this is an ongoing improvement process. When something isn't working, we want to know as quickly as possible so we can fix it. Why we needed a new tool We want to make getting help with DevResults as easy and friction-less as »

There are lots of obstacles inhibiting the flow of development data. One important one is the lack of common standards for performance indicators. We would like to start just by creating a clearinghouse of existing indicator lists, and then using crowdsourcing tools to cross-reference these. Apples to apples It's difficult, even with a relatively small and self-contained universe (like a single international NGO, or a single USAID mission) to agree »