Webinar Recap: Coordinating clean cookstove activities with mobile CRM & SMS

Mobile CRM & SMS for clean cookstove activities

The organizations that we work with oftentimes have robust processes that require collaboration and communication between multiple groups of people. Yet in the places they’re working, all this needs to happen while field staff are largely offline. We explored Proyecto Mirador‘s use of technology to keep everybody on the same page about its 130,000 clean cookstove users in rural Honduras. Specifically, we learned about their journey of digitizing their processes since 2011 with Salesforce.com, and now incorporating TaroWorks for mobile account management and Mogli SMS for SMS-driven actions.

Thank you to Proyecto Mirador’s Esther Adams and Reniery Rodriguez and Tact L3C’s Stevan Simich, for sharing their story! Read our recap below, or watch the video for the full webinar.

Services and solutions for impact organizations

Tact L3C empowers impact organizations with consulting services and building cost-effective, scalable and secure software solutions. They developed Mogli SMS to help organizations scale their communication globally and simplify their operations. Organizations like Proyecto Mirador use Mogli SMS in the field to:

• Send and receive text messages to Salesforce contacts & leads around the world
• Schedule or immediately send single or bulk messages
• Create and send text-message-based surveys
• Store and review survey results in a single contact/lead record or dashboard
• Allow anyone to query Mogli SMS for self-service info, education and support

Proyecto Mirador’s growing pains

Proyecto Mirador is a nonprofit that builds a fuel-efficient Dos por Tres cookstove in rural Honduran homes. Since its founding in 2004, Proyecto Mirador has installed over 130,000 clean cookstoves in family homes throughout the country and reduced 1 million tons of CO2 emissions. They sell Gold Standard certified voluntary carbon offsets to finance their operations.

Esther Adams, the program manager for Proyecto Mirador, explained that traditional cookstoves can cause serious health issues from inhalation of toxic wood smoke. With the Dos por Tres clean cookstove, owners can vent toxic smoke outside through a chimney, cook faster, and use 50% of the wood of traditional stoves. Additionally, the clean cookstove reduces carbon emissions and particulate matter, along with helping to prevent forest degradation.

Prior to implementing Salesforce in 2011, all Proyecto Mirador operations were tracked manually. This included beneficiary information tracked on paper, and household surveys entered into Excel spreadsheets. This made carbon verification difficult and time consuming. “We were running our operations completely on paper,” Adams revealed. “We had an incredibly organized office … but it was all on paper.”

With the Salesforce system that Tact helped them build, they were able to scale up rapidly. Each household was marked with GPS, photo and contact information, while field staff collect surveys online and offline, making data easily accessible. Dashboards provide quality assurance, visibility and improve overall operations. With carbon verification, they have transparency in reporting and an individual clean cookstove is simple to locate during verification site visits, even in remote areas. When auditors have questions, managers can quickly and easily run reports to get the answers.

This solution worked well until last year, when Salesforce Classic became too slow for their offline operations and they realized they needed to update their system.

Integrating Salesforce + Mogli SMS + TaroWorks

Reniery, the IT manager for Proyecto Mirador, explained there were many reasons for updating their system. On one hand, they replaced their iPhones with Android devices because they were expensive and broke easily in the field without easy replacement options. They also wanted to significantly improve their workflow and operations overall. Their main needs were:

• Improve surveys
• Digitize documents like registration forms
• Record GPS locations
• Correct account’s names and some other data
• Attach photos to surveys
• Scan barcodes and grab information
• Integration with Salesforce
• Offline use

In addition to Salesforce and Mogli SMS, Proyecto Mirador is now using TaroWorks for its ease of configuration without code, direct integration with Salesforce, robust surveys and its offline access to data.

Offline CRM & SMS possibilities

Each Dos por Tres stove installation follows a specific process which generally includes logging the stove activation and 3 follow-up surveys. Then there are resolving regular maintenance issues. These tasks are conducted by various roles, including inspectors, stove technicians, and supervisors.

Stove activations

Stove installations require creating a household record and activating a stove in the system. First, inspectors create a household and stove record using TaroWorks. By scanning the barcode, contact information is automatically entered into the form, avoiding data entry errors. Additionally, inspectors capture the GPS coordinates of the stove, and additional information for the installation.

Next, stove technicians install the stove and then activate the stove record using Mogli SMS.

Follow-up surveys

To track the outputs and outcomes of the stoves over time, Proyecto Mirador supervisors schedule regular visits and use TaroWorks to log survey results. These results are logged against the stove and household record, and managers can view aggregated reports using Salesforce dashboards.

Problem notifications

If supervisors notice construction issues on their visits, they can use TaroWorks to create a case in Salesforce. As soon as the case is logged, Salesforce automatically sends an SMS to the assigned contractor which includes a link to the case. Contractors can view details of the case, including photos, to help them solve the issue as soon as possible.