How IRC uses CommCare to Scale Impact
A Mission to Restore Lives and Livelihoods
The mission of the IRC is to help people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster, including the climate crisis, to survive, recover, and gain control over their future.Â
Delivering high-impact, cost-effective programs in more than 40 countries and across 20 US cities, IRC’s dedicated teams act to improve people’s health, safety, economic well being, education and power.
Moving Beyond Fragmented Data Systems
Because our grants are often short, and because we work in multiple countries and across many types of programs, from malnutrition treatment to legal advice to cash distribution, we struggled when we used various data collection platforms that were not standardised or interoperable.
Too much effort was spent building new Excel tools and not enough analysing and using data. This also created risks for data security. These issues coupled with poor-quality data led to limited data use. It required us to adopt one tool which led to an exploration of many technologies.
CommCare: A Frontline Data and Service Delivery Platform
We chose CommCare as our frontline data collection and service delivery platform. As part of our work in 2020, the IRC provided 31 million people with access to health services, 2.6 million people with clean water, and more than 800,000 children with education.
High-Quality, Quick-to-Deploy Tools
From a frontline perspective, switching to CommCare Enterprise meant that we could provide our global workforce and country offices with high quality, quick to deploy tools to support them in their data collection, and to develop standard reports to help better understand the data they were collecting . We are now on a path to having one, common platform for collecting and managing global program data.Â
Streamlining Global Administration
From a headquarter perspective, our global administration was streamlined because we could manage our project spaces centrally, allowing us to develop standard best-practice versions of tools, to provide an enhanced support model, simplify our billing, provide identity access management, and offer learning and support throughout our organisation. With our dedicated account manager, we have an avenue to raise challenges and discuss feature improvements. We also get to learn from peer organisations through CommCare’s Community of Practice.
Smarter Strategy Through Data Integration
From a reporting and strategy perspective, we use CommCare’s ecosystem of integrations so that our teams can analyse and visualise data with Excel and Power BI easily.
Greater frontline impact, easier global administration, and smarter strategy at the global level.
A Vision for Lasting Change
In the next 15 years, IRC will reach a hundred years of service. They have a clear vision supported by a global technology strategy to make lasting change in the lives of those affected by crisis.
We would like to thank Joseph Ouma for contributing to this case study. To find out more about how CommCare can serve the needs of your Organization, please reach out to us.
