Customisable and mobile: In-Contact transforms iThemba Lethu's data management and beneficiary tracking

Case study: iThemba Lethu and In-Contact

Client Overview

iThemba Lethu are a long-established NPO who provide childcare and youth development to the Cato Manor area in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Whilst having a babies home and breastmilk bank, they have extended their reach by getting funding for school education and providing programs to the area in literacy, parent workshops, skills training and leadership courses.

System Needs

iThemba Lethu needed an expandable database to track the demographic data, school details, guardian details, caretaker details, household details, progress comments, and exit details per child. A staff complement of 8 child workers and 2 parent workers, were responsible for collating this data on paper, and submitting to the office for recapture. A system was desired that would enable them to capture the data on the road and seamlessly update the database, removing double capture.

In-Contact custom designed our system to meet our programme needs and walked the bumpy journey with us as we ironed out all the data complexities and funder expectations.

Their main overseas funders each required child reports each year, in their format, which required an up to date photograph and a details of all comments made by the workers, as well as a summary of the child’s situation. Filling out these forms manually and attaching a photograph was very time consuming for nearly 350 children.

At start of each year they needed to find out which classes the children were in to ensure they had their location accurate. This resulted in time pressure to submit the year’s candidates to the donors on time. A manual spreadsheet tracking this and further which were ready for the child workers to meet, followed by review, and trying to ensure lower-level staff did not change completed reviews was awkward and needed a better solution.

As iThemba Lethu grew they needed to have attendance registers of program attendance for their different community services that they provided to 1700 people and have statistics of this work generated for them automatically for donor accountability.

Finally they needed a donor management system to record donations, issue thanks from templates, create tax certificates easily and send thank you letters.

Solution provided

In-Contact met with iThemba Lethu seven years ago and gathered their needs. They progressively implemented a custom solution, instead of a box-drop, and did the data take-on at no cost to the client. In-Contact avoids upfront fees and rather factors their costs into the number of users charged for, which typically balances out to the number of users that need to use the system. They also do not charge for ongoing enhancements, and support is local and direct with the developers.

To keep track of all the information iThemba Lethu needed an additional 57 fields added to each contact. Fortunately, this was already in place as a configurable option and the system could handle it. Some children’s home, for example, on In-Contact go to over 140 fields. Groups were set up, for the demographic, status, donor sponsorship and involvement of children and integrated into the contact’s profile to enable very flexible reporting.

A mobile app was developed at that stage for iThemba Lethu. It was a very challenging project since the app needed to work offline, and synchronize the data back to the server once in WIFI range. It also had to enable them to see all the data for a child and not just a limited set. A further technicality was often children were being updated by the controller and the field workers at the same time. To avoid live changes being overwritten, only the fields that were changed by the field workers were updated once the devices went online, leaving the controller’s changes intact.

Custom report templates were generated for the different sponsors for new child report, the annual child report and exiting report. These pulled the photographs from the photos taken on the device and formatted the data into the form provided by the donor.

A status of preparation progress was added to the child to easily report on which children had not had their classroom identified, which the staff were busy, which needed review, which were reviewed but not yet submitted. A lock was incorporated that locked a child for editing once the review process had started.

Attendance registers and statistics had already been designed for another client, and that was quick to implement, with the programs being defined as per their needs. The messaging and donation modules has also already been implemented at other clients, so we got that requirement fulfilled, with just the thank you letters and tax certificates stylized to their preference.

Client comments

"In-Contact custom designed our system to meet our programme needs and walked the bumpy journey with us as we ironed out all the data complexities and funder expectations. The system helped us track children’s attendance at specific events and keep all relevant family and personal information secure and up to date. Where we did experience issues, the support received was efficient to resolve any problems and provide training to our team where needed. Iris worked hard to ‘close gaps’ and resolve any problems we experienced and to add / expand the reporting and capacity as we needed."