10 Things That Made Us Tick in 2014

If 2013 was the year of rapid growth at Dimagi, then 2014 was even faster. Our CEO Jonathan Jackson touches upon this growth in his annual letter, focusing on how he’ll remember 2014 as the year that Dimagi hit 100 people. In addition to growing the size of our company, a lot of other big milestones occurred in 2014. The list below includes just a few of them (enjoy!)

• We hit a big self-starter milestone. By the end of 2014, 40% of all CommCare projects were being run by self-starters, meaning organizations that developed and launched CommCare applications without any in-person help from Dimagi. This includes groups like Aquaya in Senegal, MIT GlobeMed in Togo, Civic Hire in Haiti, and Lift II in Malawi. Reaching this number means a lot to us, and shows CommCare’s development into a sustainable, accessible platform.

• We improved our implementation resources, including developing an Implementer home page to help self-starters not only build but launch their apps. Our teams lead workshops like a MOTECH Suite workshop in Ghana, a CommCare self-starter workshop in Malawi, and a CommCare workshop in Myanmar. Partners like Catholic Relief Services shared their own implementation tricks by leading CommCare exposure visits in India.

• We begun scaling CommCare nationally in Haiti through a project with Pathfinder and URC, our biggest CommCare deployment to date. Haiti set the tone for taking on more nationally scaling CommCare projects, including one in Mozambique with Ariel Glaser.

• We launched projects in new sectors, including social apps project in India, a cash transfer app for WFP in Zambia, and our first regional microfinance project with Small Enterprise Foundation in South Africa. Dimagi also hosted its first mEducation roundtable and women’s empowerment workshop. We also tested and validated several CommCare uses cases, including warehouse storage for agricultural programs and CommCare for Sales Agents. We talked about our findings in these new sectors at this year’s Global mHealth Forum in DC.

• We integrated with external devices, including with cervical cancer screening tools and utilizing finger print scanning in Uganda with Biometrac.

• We generated more evidence with 15 reports and peer-reviewed papers that were written about CommCare in 2014. The majority of these was lead by our partners.

• We focused on maturity and how to achieve economies of scale. This lead to us developing and testing our maturity model in South Africa. We’re excited to introduce it to the world in March.

• We grew our logistics work with our logistics platform, CommTrack. The first CommTrack v.2 project was launched in Senegal. We also helped organizations in India and Nepal deploy proof of concepts for logistics using both CommCare and CommTrack.

• We established new teams like our R&D team and our data research team. Our R&D team is testing and developing CommCare features in Burkina Faso and India, while our data analyzed CommCare trends, some of which can be seen in their “Under the Data Tree” blog series.

• We grew our team, including hitting the triple digits. But our growth in size didn’t stop us from prioritizing spending time with each other. In 2014, we had our second Away Month in Guatemala, the first West Africa Summit, and our first tech team summit.

Want to learn more about any of these 10 things? Feel free to email me at gjavetski@dimagi.com.