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Version 5 (modified by quinn, 10 years ago) (diff)

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Project Site

Summary

Pulso ONG is a platform for collecting migrant data via SMS surveys.

Full Description

NGOs cannot respond well to migrants’ needs without quality metrics on migrant demographics, activities, interactions, and quality of life. Collecting this data is challenging because migrants are a not a settled population, may not have easy anonymous access to internet, and may distrust submitting their details in a non-anonymized form. SMS is widely used in Latin America, with prepaid phones frequently used by migrants.

Pulso ONG is a platform for executing brief questionnaire campaigns by SMS to an arbitrary set of mobile phone numbers. The responses are collected, stored, visualized, and made available through open data initiatives.

Spontaneous surveys sent to large sets of people can be useful in quickly determining if proposed legislation has a factual merit; or a survey can be sent twice, once before and once after policy is enacted, to determine the effect it has had on migrants.

This functionality completed for the America's Datafest includes a web-based interface to manage a set of surveys and their questions, groups of participants, a question queue manager that sends SMS messages, and a web hook that receives responses. In the future the platform can be extended to function as a general communication intermediary between migrants with mobile phones and NGOs.

Features

  • Survey participant is only a phone number (i.e. it's basically anonymous).
  • Questions are associated with surveys, which are scheduled to be sent on a specific date.
  • Once survey begins, questions are frozen to prevent changing parameters.
  • Responses are associated to the participant and survey.
  • Questions are formatted using a simple markup syntax to allow short questions < 160 characters.
  • Question format is parsed to ensure options can be validated against participant responses.
  • Participant is notified if they send an invalid response.
  • Participant is notified when the survey is complete.
  • Reports viewable for each survey.
  • CSV download of survey data.

Video Presentation

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Team

You can email us at ​pulso@strangecode.com.

Demo Site

Not just a demo site; this is a fully functional tool ready for use. Careful: it really sends SMSs! =)

Source Code

Accessible through this project site (see Browse Source at top) or through SVN at ​https://svn.strangecode.com/pulso/.

Documentation