Everything You Need To Know About TaroWorks 3.1

The brand new TaroWorks 3.1 is here and it comes with a bunch of great new features.

The major features of this release come in four areas: Groups – Assign Mobile Users to Jobs

• Ability to assign Jobs to certain Groups so that your field staff only see their relevant Jobs.  Groups can be created for any need in your organization such as by project, country, role, etc.

Offline Score Calculation

• Ability to see calculated sum from Scoring Groups (including PPI) immediately on the device at the end of the survey

More PPI Capability

• PPI Templates now have basic demographic questions as recommended by the PPI team to enable built-in reporting
• Two new dashboards and eight new reports:
  • Outreach and Monitoring, and Demographics Dashboards cross referenced with PPI data
• Ability to customize the reports and dashboards for your own PPI reporting

 Other Mobile Enhancements

• At the end of a job, ability to repeat the same job immediately
• Empty dates are now allowed (to enable proper field mapping)
• Clearer messaging on Repeat section in a survey
• Clearer messaging around capturing GPS coordinates at GPS location question type
• Improved back button behavior

For those of you new to PPI, or the Progress out of Poverty Index, here’s a quick explainer. The answers to a set of ten questions about a household’s characteristics and asset ownership are scored to compute the likelihood that the household is living below the poverty line. This helps organizations evaluate whether they are truly reaching the poor.

 In the area of PPI we have added eight new reports and two new dashboards which are, of course, customizable

The first dashboard is an example of an overview of PPI metrics for outreach and monitoring. This allows you to gain a sense economic situation of your TaroWorks Respondents and the outreach your field force is having by user when collecting this data. The second dashboard is an example of ways to analyze your PPI data by Demographic Information. In order to help you further slice and dice this poverty line probability data that you’re gathering with TaroWorks, we’ve worked with our PPI team to add some demographic questions to all the PPI templates including information like the age and gender of the respondent. Another feature in 3.1 that can be leveraged with PPI is an improvement we’ve made in the area of scoring. TaroWorks scoring allows you to assign numeric values to individual multiple choice responses to survey question in order to evaluate an otherwise qualitative response in a quantitative way. For example, an organization may say that, based on the responses to a series of questions, if the score is below 50, the respondent is eligible for the organization’s services; if above, they are not. Previously, field officers did not have instantaneous visibility to what that score was at the conclusion of the survey. Now, with the offline score calculation in 3.1, they will. And they can use that information to carry on with their field work on TaroWorks or otherwise.

And now the feature you’ve all been waiting for – assigning Jobs to Groups

You can now control which Jobs show up on a field officer’s mobile device. For those of you who have a large volume of published Jobs of which only a subset may be pertinent to a particular mobile user, this should greatly improve your field team’s user experience. You can manage the assignments by individual users or by creating Public Groups. Additionally, as a TaroWorks user who is creating Jobs, you can start by giving only yourself access to the Job on your mobile device when you are testing your set-up.

There are also a few enhancements in the area of mobile usability

In order to streamline scenarios where a field officer wants to repeat the same Job in succession (i.e. taking attendance), we have added a “Repeat Job” button at the end of the Job, which will return the user back to the final   selection in a hierarchy drill-down. For example, in a scenario where you are registering a group of farmers where the hierarchy drill-down requires selections of Region, Country, District and Village, when you click Repeat Job after registering the farmer, you will be returned to the Village Selection. This saves clicks to re-open the job and re-navigate the drill-down, but you CAN choose to move back up in the hierarchy should you want to make changes. When updating records it was previously necessary to update any date fields on the existing record, as these fields would always be written. Now you have the option of skipping this type of question if it does not need to be updated. Finally we’ve had some requests to update the wording at the end of a repeating question as it was confusing to some field officers. We have done so and now the name of the section that you would be repeating is also referenced. We’ll be hosting a webinar next week to do a more detailed overview of TaroWorks 3.1. In the meantime, please check for documentation on our new features at taroworks.zendesk.com or submit a support ticket for help upgrading.