Mobile Management Guide

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Mobile Management GuideLearn how Magpi can help you manage teams and programs more efficiently, with easy reminders, dashboards, and automation

http://www.magpi.com

Introduction: Magpi Isn’t Just for Data Collection 3Automating Administrative Forms 4Zambia Transport Log Example 5Automate the Reporting Process 6Acknowledging Submission of the Travel Log by SMS or Email 7Informing the Supervisor that a Travel Report has been Submitted for Review 8

Mobile Reminders & Alerts 9UNICEF Example: Reminders for Data Submission and Meeting Attendance 9Step One: Importing Contacts, Using Groups 9Step Two: Creating Reminders for the Groups 10Step Three: Setting Timing for the Reminder 12

Using Reports to Build a Project Dashboard 13UNICEF Example: Creating a Dashboard to Keep the Team on Track 13How Magpi Reports Layout Works 13Creating Our Dashboard 14

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Mobile Management Guide


Introduction: Magpi Isn’t Just for Data Collection

The spread of mobile phones and internet connectivity provides opportunities to make every program run more effectively and efficiently. We call this “mobile management,” and Magpi can help, even when it’s not a “data collection” program, per se: with easy automation, reminders, scheduling, dashboards, and other tools.

In this guide we’ll cover how to use Magpi to keep your team on schedule, informed, and effective – no matter what the goal – using three

simple web and mobile technology approaches:

• automating admin forms

• creating automatic reminders

• building real-time dashboards

And because each of these is done without programming, you’ll gain the benefits without having to spend program money on expensive expertise. “As easy as Magpi.”

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Automating Administrative Forms

Every program has vouchers and logs that need to be managed, and it’s much easier to do this using the mobile phone that each team member is already carrying than to try to manage slips of paper. This is what mobile management is all about: easily replacing paper systems with digital ones.

We don’t think of these as “data collection,” but they are necessary to the smooth functioning of any program. A particularly common example for any program with field activities, is the transport log – which is used to report field activities, and often to request reimbursement for fuel and other related costs.

Years ago, we were training a group of Zambian health workers on how to use EpiSurveyor (the Magpi predecessor) on Palm Pilot PDAs. We had one half-day of training on a Monday, then were to return to the classroom on Tuesday. On Tuesday morning, some of the students were excited to show what they had done “after dinner last night” and called the facilitator to look at their mobile screens.

As it turned out, they had re-created their paper travel reimbursement form – the one that allowed them to get reimbursed for fuel, vehicle rentals, etc. The form collected information on who they had visited, on what day, and for what purpose. And the students realized that if they filled it out electronically they could file it faster. Which meant they’d be reimbursed faster.

They had automated one of their essential admin forms, after just half a day of training!

We love that example, because it shows how smart people, given easy-to-use tools, find ways to make their lives easier, without being told to.



Zambia Transport Log Example

Those enterprising students in Lusaka were on to something. Every project has vouchers and logs that need to be managed, and it’s much easier to do this using the mobile phone that each team member is already carrying than to try to manage slips of paper. This is what mobile management is all about: easily replacing paper systems with digital ones.

You can see a sketch of the Zambian transport log at right.

This is super-easy to recreate in Magpi (took only 3 minutes) as an electronic form. Here’s how it looks in the Magpi Design tab:


Tip: if you want to use this example as a starting point, just log into Magpi to your forms dashboard, click the “Template” checkbox above the list of forms, then click the refresh button. You will now see “travel_log” in your

forms list, and you can open it and “Save a Copy” for making your own edits.


Automate the Reporting Process

Of course, collecting travel log information is only the first step, right? Very likely, the submitted information will need to be reviewed by a supervisor and approved before payment can be made.

One approach to making such a system work better and faster would be to notify the supervisor each time a new voucher was submitted (you could even build in the intelligence to know which staff member was under which supervisor, but we’ll keep it simple for now).

Below we’ll show how you could use the built-in Magpi Respond system to both acknowledge submission of a travel voucher, and also to notify the supervisor.



Acknowledging Submission of the Travel Log by SMS or Email

To send an SMS acknowledgement to the field staff member who submitted a travel report, we’ll need to do two things:

1 – go into Magpi’s Messaging dashboard to create the appropriate SMS message

2 – open the travel_log form, above, and go to the Respond tab to set up the automation

If you go to the Messaging dashboard and click the Add link above the list of messages, it brings up a dialog that you can customize for your message, as shown below.

Now, in step 2, we have to instruct Magpi that when a travel report is submitted, it should reply to the data collector who sent it in with this SMS.

For that, we open the travel_log form and click on the Respond tab. In the Respond tab, we can add “response items”, each of which specifies some kind of message (text, audio, or email) to be sent in response to incoming data.

Below is a response we built in less than a minute specifying that if any travel log item is submitted where the date is not equal to “01/01/2000” (which means basically any submitted item), then the message we created above will get sent to “datacollector”.


Tip: “datacollector” is a special word in Magpi Respond. When you enter it, it always means the person who submitted the current data record. If that person is using the Magpi mobile app, and logged in with their email,

the message will go to them as an email. If they’re submitting data by SMS, it will go out as an SMS.


Informing the Supervisor that a Travel Report has been Submitted for Review

OK, so now we’ve set up a system that allows field staff to submit their travel logs remotely from their phones, and even acknowledges their report submissions. But we should probably also tell the supervisor when a log is submitted, so they can review it.

To do that we went to the Magpi Messaging dashboard, and created another Magpi message that says “A new travel log has been submitted. Please log into Magpi to review and approve. Thank you!”. Once that message is created, we can go back to the form and add it to the Magpi Respond item we’ve already created.

And below you can see what it looks like once we’ve done that.



Mobile Reminders & Alerts

Every project can also benefit from automatic reminders and alerts. We don’t need a study to tell us that alarm clocks work, and likewise it’s very clear that sending people a meeting reminder makes it more likely they’ll attend the meeting.

Of course, that only makes sense if it’s easy and affordable – and with Magpi it is.

UNICEF Example: Reminders for Data Submission and Meeting Attendance

UNICEF has long been a user of Magpi for mobile data collection in the context of polio eradication and other aspects of child health, in Sudan, Kenya, and elsewhere. Let’s imagine a UNICEF team that’s working on a variety of child health activities. Every week, their field teams are supposed to submit travel logs, and also attend a staff meeting – but the project manager has noticed that she’s not getting all the travel logs, and that attendance at the staff meeting is down.Automating travel logs is easy with Magpi, as discussed in the last section,

but the project manager thinks maybe it would help to remind the staff by SMS mobile reminders.

Let’s go through this step by step.

Step One: Importing Contacts, Using Groups

To communicate with your team, you’ll need to let Magpi know who they are. That means importing them as contacts into Magpi from an Excel file. And just as important as learning how to import is learning how to use groups in Magpi.

Groups are words that you can use to categorize and organize your contacts (this is similar to the use of “tags” for Magpi forms and messages). Each contact can be in one or more groups. So in our UNICEF example, we can imagine that all of the in-country staff might be in the “country” group, while only some of them who routinely go into the field might be classified in the “field” group.

And below we can see what an Excel file might look like with a group of staff members for our example.



and here’s the same group on the Magpi Messaging dashboard after import:

Step Two: Creating Reminders for the Groups

Now that they’re imported in Magpi, and assigned to groups, we can create reminder messages that pertain to all of the contacts, or only to specific groups.

As an example, let’s make a text message reminder to go out to the field team every Friday afternoon, to remind them to submit their travel logs.

To do this, we’ll go back to Magpi’s Messaging dashboard (by clicking Messaging at the top Magpi menu), and click the Add link over the list of messages to bring up the new message dialog. Then we’ll enter an appropriate message (see next page).



Note that we’ve taken the opportunity to tag (i.e. categorize) the message as pertaining to “UNICEF”,”field”, and “admin”. That can help us later when we have lots of messages to manage.

Next stop: setting the timing of the reminder.



Step Three: Setting Timing for the Reminder

Now we’ve got the contacts, sorted into groups, and we’ve got the reminder message. All we need to do is to combine them with a timing. To do this we’ll need to:

1 select the message

2 select the contacts

3 select the timing

And in the image below you can see that we’ve done just that, specifying that the message should first go out on Friday, October 21 at 1300 Colombo time – and to repeat for one year (52 weeks).

Then just click send and you’ve got yourself an automated mobile reminders system, which should increase the on-time reports and cut down on admin staff needing to track down the non-submitters.

And it would be just as easy to set up another reminder for the staff meeting.


Less Than the Price of Lunch

If you’re wondering about the cost of the reminder system above, we estimate that sending that weekly reminder to those five staff members for a year would cost about US $5. Yes, five dollars for the whole year!

And the system would probably save more than a few hours of administrative time.


Using Reports to Build a Project Dashboard

We built our Magpi Reports features to give people a simple way to visualize the data they are collecting. From the initial feedback, though, we realize that Reports is also useful to build a quick webpage or “project dashboard” for all sorts of project materials – including graphs of your data.

Read on to understand how this works.

UNICEF Example: Creating a Dashboard to Keep the Team on Track

In the last section, we showed you how to use Magpi’s SMS messaging system to set up reminders for your team, using the example of a fictitious UNICEF team in the field. Today, let’s imagine that we’re still managing that same child health team, which is engaged in doing nutritional assessments, and we want to be able to put together a web-based, real-time project dashboard for team coordination. The dashboard needs to:

1. be easy to set up and edit

2. display graphs showing the current status of our data collection activities

3. show a staff calendar

4. display some of our field photos

5. display some training materials (and maybe a video)

So the goals for the dashboard are to inform (via the graphs), coordinate (via the calendar), train (via the video) and help maintain team spirit (via the photos). Because each Magpi

Report is a customizable web page, we can create a dashboard just by making a Magpi Report!

How Magpi Reports Layout Works

Magpi Reports use a simple framework to organize the different elements. Basically, an element can be either full-width, or half-width. Importantly, Magpi Reports are “responsive” to the size of the screen they’re being viewed on.

Below you can see how the same five-element report would look on a laptop screen versus on a smartphone screen (notice how the side-by-side elements shift in position, and the full-width elements become half-width).



Creating Our Dashboard

Based on the info above, we went into our Magpi Pro Account and created a report with these elements:

1. title

2. project notes & contact numbers (Magpi text report element)

3. progress towards goal of doing 500 assessments (Magpi meter report element)

4. map of where we did the completed assessments (Magpi map)

5. team calendar (embedded from Google Calendar)

6. team performance graph: calculating average time taken to do an assessment for each team member (data collected in Magpi, analyzed automatically in Google Sheets, then embedded into the report)

7. a training video showing how to do nutritional assessments (embedded from YouTube)

8. a couple of team photos (embedded from any photo site)

On the right you can see the resulting report/dashboard. Imagine how useful it is for the team to have all this important real-time information in one spot, easily accessible in the browser of a laptop, desktop, or any phone or tablet – password-protected if necessary.

And all with no programming at all: easy as Magpi!

View a live version of the sampledashboard at right at

http://bit.ly/magpi-child-health-dashboard


http://bit.ly/magpi-child-health-dashboard


Data & Analytics

Mobile Management Guide