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SurveyStream has been used on over 35 surveys at IDinsight across India, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and the Philippines. SurveyStream provides a number of benefits including time savings, improved resource management, and reduction in errors compared to manual, one-off survey management systems. This page offers guidance on how to decide if you should use SurveyStream and, if so, how to set yourself up for success.

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Evaluating Fit With Your Survey

SurveyStream is a collection of features that streamline survey management. Compared to more manual systems, the configuration process on SurveyStream tends to require less time, but the bulk of the time savings users get from SurveyStream comes from the automation of daily tasks while the survey is running. This means that SurveyStream provides greater time saving benefits for longer-running surveys, or generally for surveys where a given feature is automating a lot of daily tasks (for example, a phone survey where new assignments need to be communicated to surveyors multiple times per day). As a general rule, for in-person surveys, we’ve seen SurveyStream work best for surveys that are running for at least 2 weeks. In the documentation section for each feature we provide a deep dive on how the given feature adds value over alternative, more manual systems. It’s important to read these deep dives carefully to understand whether SurveyStream is a good fit for your survey. In addition to understanding the potential value of SurveyStream for your survey, it’s important to assess whether your survey satisfies the technical requirements for SurveyStream. For example, SurveyStream requires a list of surveyors with unique alphanumeric identifiers. You can read more about the technical requirements in the setup guides for each feature.

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Financial Considerations

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SurveyCTO subscription

SurveyStream requires full API access in order to fetch data from SurveyCTO. This is available in the ‘Advanced’ package priced at $700 / month.

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Budgeting for SurveyStream use

In addition to SurveyCTO subscription costs, there are two types of costs you will have to budget for using SurveyStream.
  1. Staff costs: You will have to account for time spent by the point person for SurveyStream for onboarding, configuration, and troubleshooting. Additionally, depending on the features that you will be using in your project, you will have to budget for time spent by a DSEM teammate for configuration and troubleshooting.
  2. Infrastructure costs: You will have to budget for $10 / day as infrastructure costs for using SurveyStream. As a rule of thumb, you can use the avg expected number of days of data collection.
Here is a link to a budget estimator that can help you to come up with budget estimates.

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Setting Expectations

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Another tool in your toolkit

There is a learning curve to using SurveyStream just as there is for any other tool like SurveyCTO. Teams should plan to have a point person with a solid understanding of SurveyStream to set themselves up for success on their project.

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Not an end-to-end solution

SurveyStream is not intended to be an end-to-end tool for managing every aspect of your survey. SurveyStream’s features have been developed to alleviate specific high-leverage pain points for teams at IDinsight.

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Product vs. service

In its current iteration, SurveyStream is not a pure self-service product and requires support from the SurveyStream engineering team for certain aspects of setup and ongoing technical support. Teams should expect the need for regular back-and-forth communication with the SurveyStream engineering team while their survey is running.

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Avoiding Pitfalls

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Finalizing survey inputs

Configuring SurveyStream requires certain inputs like the sample, list of surveyors, and SurveyCTO questionnaire. The earlier these inputs are finalized the more breathing room your team will have to configure SurveyStream and test that it’s working as expected. We’ve seen teams face challenges when SurveyStream configuration gets delayed due to late inputs and needs to be done during the hectic first days of data collection.

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Uncertainty around survey operations

SurveyStream works best when survey operations are relatively stable. When teams are new to running a survey or are experimenting in a new geography or survey modality, significant changes often need to be made to field operations on the fly while the survey is ongoing. This can require reconfiguring SurveyStream or even result in certain SurveyStream features no longer being relevant.