Dobility, Inc., the company behind SurveyCTO, was founded by Dr. Christopher Robert, a technology veteran who took a decade off from technology to live in the developing world, get three degrees in public policy, and become a development economist.
The SurveyCTO platform grew out of Chris’s experience as a researcher on several Harvard-based development economics projects in Tamil Nadu, South India. The same technical challenges seemed to plague every project, and it became apparent that better technology could simplify the lives of research team members, reduce project costs, and improve data quality. Leveraging skills honed as a technology entrepreneur earlier in his career, Dr. Robert quickly assembled a small team and developed the prototype for SurveyCTO. Dobility was born.
Early users and collaborators at Innovations for Poverty Action and Poverty Action Lab had great ideas for how SurveyCTO could further simplify the tasks of research and field teams, and for how technology could facilitate the collection of higher-quality data. Inspired by those ideas, the Dobility team has worked to improve both the technology itself and the reach of that technology.
Since its founding, Dobility has grown to include offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Washington, DC and a team that spans six continents. Thousands of users in more than 165 countries now rely on SurveyCTO for their data collection projects. Read about SurveyCTO’s guiding principles…
