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Overview

SurveyStream lets users easily assign and communicate work to teams of surveyors. Through the assignments feature, survey targets (for example, households to be surveyed) can be allocated and then communicated to surveyors through automated emails.

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Key features

Choose one or more targets to assign to a surveyor.
Use live data from your linked SurveyCTO form to inform assignment selections. You can easily reference information like target completion status, total visit attempts, revisit appointment times, or surveyor productivity while making assignments.
Delegate assignment tasks to field supervisors. SurveyStream lets you divvy up your target and surveyor lists among field supervisors using matching criteria like location, language or through manual mapping.
Send emails to surveyors with details of their assigned targets. Information can be sent as encrypted PDFs for enhanced security, if needed.
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Mark surveyors as dropout to release their targets for reassignment to active surveyors.

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Walkthrough

[Video showing end-to-end use of the assignments flow (not the config)]

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Configuration

Details on how to configure the assignments feature can be found here. Estimated time to configure assignments on SurveyStream: [2-3 hours]

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When to do assignments on SurveyStream

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Efficiency benefits during surveying

SurveyStream assignments can create recurring efficiencies for teams in the assigning process:
  • Through email automation, SurveyStream can reduce the time it takes the survey team to send messages to surveyors with new assignment information.
  • If incoming data from SurveyCTO like target status, number of visit attempts, revisit appointment times, or surveyor productivity needs to be referenced when making assignments, SurveyStream creates efficiencies every time your team would have needed to download the data from SurveyCTO, run some analysis code, and put the output into a format where it can be referenced for the assigning process.
  • SurveyStream makes it easy to delegate the assigning process to field supervisors, creating a more efficient allocation of work for survey teams.
SurveyStream creates these efficiencies every time the assigning process is done and new assignments are communicated to surveyors, so total efficiency gains will be greater for surveys when:
  • Reassigning is frequent (for example, to balance productivity, or for surveys where revisit appointments are common).
  • Survey teams are large.
  • Surveys run for an extended period of time.
The flipside of this dynamic is that SurveyStream assignments may not be be a good fit for surveys with very small surveying teams, where assignments of targets to surveyors is fixed for the duration of the survey, or where an on-field dynamic sampling method (like right-hand-rule) is used by surveyors who then immediately administer the survey to the sampled target.

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Alternative tools and approaches

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Manually rebalancing assignments

To rebalance assignments without SurveyStream, teams need to download and analyze the latest SurveyCTO submissions to check the completion status of targets and adjust assignments based on surveyor productivity and availability. The assignments then need to be manually shared with surveyors (usually done by sharing first with field supervisors to verify the assignments). SurveyStream improves on this process by cutting out the steps (1) to download and analyze the submission data and (2) to share it manually with teams. Delegating the assigning process to field supervisors on SurveyStream can bring added efficiencies for teams as well.

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SurveyCTO case management

Case management on SurveyCTO can be used to show surveyors their list of targets within the SurveyCTO mobile app. This can be a good option to eliminate the need to manually send assignments to surveyors. However, the rebalancing process will still need to be done manually and can’t be easily delegated to field supervisors.

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Real-world use of assignments on SurveyStream

In India, an IDinsight team used SurveyStream assignments for an agricultural survey covering 10,000 agricultural plots in four North Indian states over a one month period. The team estimated that SurveyStream assignments saved them 4 days of survey management team time over that period.

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Technical considerations

Data from SurveyCTO is synced to SurveyStream every 30 minutes. This applies to columns in the assignments table like target completion status, total visit attempts, revisit appointment times, and surveyor productivity that are calculated using incoming data from the SurveyCTO form.