Message from TaroWorks' new CEO

January marks a renewal not just of the calendar but also for TaroWorks. Last week, I joined the team as the new CEO, excited about the opportunity in front of us and with a mission to grow our business significantly in 2017.

I find TaroWorks compelling because I have experienced first-hand the problems facing organizations delivering goods and services in emerging markets. In 2013 and 2014, I started and ran Kopo Kopo’s expansion operation in Tanzania. In that role, I managed a field force of agents who recruited merchants to accept mobile money payments. Field staff had to manage merchant applications, sales commissions, ongoing customer support, and activation visits using paper forms, spreadsheets, and a lot of manual bookkeeping. It’s not easy!

Some of the progress highlights we made in 2016 include:

• We now support projects in 37 countries on 4 continents
• We grew our number of active users by 11%
• We released 2 new versions of the TaroWorks platform, including new features like: editing published surveys, filtering records to show relevant records for each field agent, table format questions with the ability to pre-populate rows (great for attendance!)
• Expanded our customer support team with a new manager based in Nairobi
• Launched a new website with case studies and a blog

Additionally, we increased our commitment to sharing our learnings from our engagements around the world. We are committed to sharing this information via our blog. If you haven’t visited https://taroworks.org/blog/ lately, I recommend that you do so and consider subscribing to the updates. You’ll be sure to learn from the other committed organizations using the TaroWorks platform — we sure do.

2017 will be an exciting year for TaroWorks and we’ll have more news to share as we continue on our mission of making it easier for you to serve your customers and stakeholders and improve the lives of the world’s poor. I promise to reach out periodically to update you on our progress, both by email and via our blog.

I welcome your continued partnership, feedback and would enjoy connecting with you. You can reach me by email at brent@taroworks.org or Twitter @TaroWorksApp. I wish you a prosperous 2017 and will be in touch again soon.

Sincerely,
Brent Chism
CEO, TaroWorks