15 Highlights at Dimagi from 2015

2015 was an epic year at Dimagi! We revealed a new CommCare mobile look, earned a spot on Entrepreneur’s Top Company Cultures list, launched our Maturity Model, surpassed 1 million form submissions per month, built lasting relationships with partners in 50+ countries, and so much more. 

To follow up on our Top 10 List from 2014, we decided to go even bigger with our 15 highlights from 2015. Check them out below – and thank you for making 2015 one to remember!

• CommCare hit some big milestones. 2015 was the year that CommCare projects became active in 50 countries (thanks Papua New Guinea!), and crossed 1 million forms submitted per month. Our goal in 2016 is to increase our activity ten-fold, so that we’re reaching 10,000,000 forms per month. Bring it on!

• More research backed CommCare. 11 papers were written about CommCare in 2015, including a study by Mathematica Policy Research that is one of the largest and strongest yet. The study presents findings from an RCT of a CARE International program in Bihar, India, including results that detect changes in life-saving behaviors.

• Our Global Services team developed tools for scale. In November Dimagi released its Maturity Model to help organizations learn how to develop and grow mobile systems, from the pilot phase through scale. The Model was built based on our experience implementing 300+ projects, and guides organizations in developing a clear project roadmap for mobile systems. You can read about how organizations like Catholic Relief Services scaled its ReMiND project in India using the Maturity Model.

• Our partners expanded multi-country projects. Several CommCare projects scaled across multiple countries. World Vision grew its MOTECH Suite nutrition application around the world, Abt Associates scaled a malaria mHealth intervention to 9 African countries, and Harvard School of Public Health and FIGO launched a seven-country study to support the reporting & research on postpartum IUDs.

• Dimagi continued to fight Ebola. Dimagi was on one of 12 groups selected by USAID for the Fighting Ebola Grand Challenge. Through our work, we built template applications, ran an online Ebola Response app building course with over 200 people enrolled, and led webinars to share lessons.

• Our R&D Team grew into new sectors. Our R&D team continued to build new CommCare features for different sectors. We expanded our clinical work with organizations like Terre Des Hommes in Burkina Faso and tested our mLabour tool for child delivery in India. We continued to grow in monitoring & evaluation and supply chain. We watched organizations like Dolima in Senegal build sales applications with CommCare and farmers like those with the Rainforest Alliance in Guatemala use mobile tools.

• Our Academy Team launched online courses. In 2015 we rolled out CommCare Academy, an online course platform for CommCare users. By enrolling in CommCare Academy, students can become certified in different aspects of CommCare – including app building, program management, etc. It’s been great running into certified people all over the world, including in Sierra Leone.

• CommCare got a makeover! We announced a new mobile user interface for CommCare applications this year, giving CommCare a more modern, colorful, and engaging look. If you haven’t yet, make sure to update your applications with the new User Interface

• Our engineers made app-building faster and easier. In addition to providing our users with documentation to build apps, we also made the process easier. We developed copy and paste functionality into the CommCare app builder for faster iterations. And instead of starting apps from scratch, our team introduced survey and case management template apps to save users time, including some for Ebola response.

• 2015 was the year for reporting. One of our favorite CommCare features from 2015 was the Report Builder (beta), which allows people to design and build reports. Users can select the type of report they want, the indicators they want to track, and whether they want to share it over the web and/or email.  

• We released lots of great features. We updated CommCare’s SMS functionality, including adding email messaging, SMS chat, and new reports. We took what our users love about case management and applied it to mobile workers – tracking data about your mobile workers over time unlocks some killer new app workflows. We created tools to better manage data, made it easier to organize apps, and focused on increasing our servers’ speed.   

• We improved our storytelling. We wrote case studies with partners about CommCare’s impact on their projects, while many other partners wrote blogs about their experiences using CommCare. We also got better at information sharing by improving online documentation and introducing webinars.

• The spotlight was on our team. Eight Dimagis had the opportunity to speak about our work at this year’s Global mHealth Forum – one of the biggest industry conferences. We were thrilled when Entrepreneur recognized Dimagi as one of the Top 25 Best Large-Company Cultures of 2015. 

• We prepared for the future. In 2015 we buckled down and focused on what’s next. Our engineers built our server capacity to better handle projects going to scale, while our global services team prepared for some of our biggest scaling projects to date in India (more on both soon!) 

• And, as usual, we loved our users. If the emojis in our engineers’ code don’t say it loud enough, we love what we do  because of our users. We watched them take CommCare selfies at trainings, be inspired enough to make CommCare dresses, and use CommCare to provide high quality care.

Thanks for making 2015 such a great year for us – we hope it was for you too! And of course, if you want to get in touch, feel free to reach out.