The donors of the world invested $132 billion last year in global development projects, but most donors and implementers are still unable to account for results. And most development workers in the field still don't have the tools they deserve. The solution is not to keep trying to re-create commercially available software in-house. Some history: A few years back, before we made DevResults, we were a web development shop. Much »

Curious where we're headed in the next year? Here's a quick outline of our product roadmap for 2017. Background I'm taking a slightly different approach to the Product Roadmap this year. Last year I tried to lay out a high-level roadmap for the entire year with estimates as to when we'd deliver certain features. But as we worked more to systematize quarterly check-ins and further committed ourselves to agile development »

To all our partners and affiliates, we hope that your staff and their families are weathering recent executive orders. We're proud to work with folks from all over the world. »

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 »

When we first started on DevResults in 2009, our goal was to make it easier for projects to manage their work and use their data. Over time, we expanded the scope of our software to support entire USAID Missions, regional programs, and globally-distributed organizations managing portfolios across dozens of countries. Today, our goal is to make software that meets the local and evolving needs of practitioners in the field while »

We are pleased to announce the first of our major visualization overhauls: the new Indicator Targets vs. Actuals Graph. What It Gives You The new visualization unleashes all kinds of new functionality, including: Depending on the indicator's configuration, you can choose from one of four graph types: Line (like the old visualization) Area Column Stacked Column You can choose whether to display data incrementally or cumulatively. You can choose to »

No matter how great your workflow is, odds are that eventually someone will create a duplicate location in your DevResults site--even if you're the only one creating them. And it's totally possible that data has already been collected or calculated for that duplicate location. We wanted to make finding and merging duplicate locations simple, so we are proud to introduce our latest addition: the Merge Duplicate Locations Tool! 1 Why »

Over the last two years, we've greatly expanded the ways we let you know about changes in the software. We're excited to announce a new addition to this: Release Notes. We also wanted to take the opportunity to remind you of all the ways you can stay up to date on what's happening with us. Release Notes We make changes to the software almost every day. In the last year, »

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 »

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 »