PRODUCT OVERVIEW
SurveyCTO is a powerful, field-tested platform that allows you to collect high-quality data using mobile phones, tablets, or computers—even when you’re offline.
CREATE EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED
SurveyCTO was built to be powerful, scaleable, and flexible. Create forms and modular workflows with complex branching logic, non-linear navigation, randomized elements, multimedia and GIS capabilities, linkages to previous survey rounds, and form version control. If you can imagine it, our platform can do it.
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Below are some of our most powerful features. Click here to explore them all.
DESIGN COMPLEX FORMS EFFORTLESSLY
Create forms directly in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, or with our drag-and-drop form designer, and jump seamlessly between them.
PREVIEW AND TEST IN-BROWSER
Use our testing interface to efficiently and rigorously test your forms.
USE INNOVATIVE AND MEDIA-RICH QUESTION TYPES
Enhance your survey with audio, photos, videos, signatures, device sensor data, and GPS positions, boundaries, and paths.
UPDATE FORMS SEAMLESSLY
Deploy new or revised forms to mobile devices and the web with a simple upload or click of a button.
MONITOR DATA QUALITY IN REAL TIME
Perform random field audio audits, watch for outliers and suspicious distributions, review and correct raw data before publishing, and receive nightly reports.
PRE-LOAD AND STREAM DATA
Pre-load existing data into your forms, as well as stream incoming data straight into other forms.
VISUALIZE YOUR DATA
Use the built-in Data Explorer for instant visibility of your aggregate data, as well as the ability to drill down to individual submissions.
DOWNLOAD THE APP FROM THE GOOGLE PLAY STORE OR APPLE STORE
Use SurveyCTO Collect on any Android or iOS mobile device to fill out and test your forms.
INTEGRATE YOUR DATA OR DOWNLOAD IN MULTIPLE FORMATS
Route your data to hundreds of external systems thanks to integrations with Google Sheets, Zapier, and OpenFN, plus RESTful and webhook APIs. You can also download your data in multiple formats to use with other tools.
ACCESS AND MONITOR YOUR DATA INSTANTLY
See your data right away. Learn—and adapt—more quickly by skipping the costly, time-consuming, and error-prone task of entering and cleaning data by hand.
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BENEFITS OF DIGITAL OVER PAPER
If you haven’t yet switched from paper to digital data collection, we’ve adapted resources from Oxfam UK to demonstrate the opportunities of going digital.
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HOW IT WORKS
SurveyCTO’s intuitive design allows you to seamlessly design complex forms, conduct rigorous tests, collect data online or offline, monitor incoming data for quality, and learn from that data. You can use our powerful built-in tool for monitoring and visualization and also integrate with external platforms of your choice.
KEEP YOUR DATA SECURE
Protect your data, your subjects, and your reputation. SurveyCTO is GDPR compliant and supports multiple layers of encryption and redundancy—from your device all the way to our secure servers. Read about our commitment to privacy.
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INDUSTRY-LEADING ENCRYPTION
SurveyCTO always encrypts Internet communications with SSL technology, which means your data is always secure in transit. For premium security, SurveyCTO can also encrypt all your data at the point of collection, using your own 2048-bit encryption keys. That way, not even SurveyCTO engineers can see your data.
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SILOED ACCESS AND CUSTOMIZED USER ROLES
SurveyCTO allows you to add and remove teams as your project needs change, as well as customize user access to forms and data. You can also manage user access with single sign-on (SSO) support, a central authentication system that allows for secure access changes in the case of device theft or team restructuring.
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DEVICE-SIDE DATA REDUNDANCY
SurveyCTO stores all collected survey data on the device’s removable memory card and backs it up on the device’s internal memory. That way, if a device fails, the data is safe on the memory card, and if a memory card fails, it’s safe on the device.
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SERVER-SIDE DATA REDUNDANCY
SurveyCTO is designed with multiple layers of data redundancy in mind, ensuring that data is recoverable from your server (and from SurveyCTO’s desktop application). All servers are mirrored 24×7 across multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) locations and backed up every minute.
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SAFE SHARING
SurveyCTO allows you to control which fields to share or publish—and which to keep safely encrypted with your own private encryption key. With SurveyCTO, data security isn’t an all-or-nothing affair.
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COLD ROOM COMPUTER SUPPORT
For your most sensitive data, SurveyCTO makes it easy to shuttle encrypted data to a cold room computer, on which it can be safely decrypted. That way, your data is never exposed on an Internet-connected computer.
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IRB COMPLIANCE
SurveyCTO provides data security that satisfies the most sophisticated and demanding institutional review boards (IRBs).
TRUST OUR PLATFORM
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SOFTWARE STABILITY
SurveyCTO is built on fixed, stable Linux servers that we maintain and won’t change over time. Every subscription has its own virtual server that includes the SurveyCTO software, as well as matching versions of the Android and desktop software components.
CODE CONSISTENCY
The mobile apps and web forms have an identical code base. What you see online is what you get in the field.
SYSTEM RELIABILITY
Around-the-clock server uptime with 24×7 monitoring and multiple level backstopping means that you never have to worry about outages or performance issues.
24×7 PROFESSIONAL SUPPORT
Submit a support request and receive a prompt response from our expert research and data collection professionals. No question is too small.
EXTENSIVE CAPACITY-BUILDING RESOURCES
Take advantage of our online training course, over 230 help articles, sample forms, video tutorials, and user forums.
SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MODEL
We are a mission-driven company funded by—and accountable to—our users, as opposed to donors or VCs. This enables us to be financially sustainable while continuously developing new features and products for our users—without any gaps in support or service.
JOIN OUR COMMUNITY OF USERS
Thousands of users in more than 165 countries rely on SurveyCTO. Read some of their profiles to learn how they power their data collection needs in health, economics, agriculture, education, governance, and other sectors.
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SurveyCTO can be a solution for you.
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SurveyCTO is based on Open Data Kit (ODK), the most widely-used open source platform for data collection. We added hundreds of improvements, hosting, documentation, and support, in order to increase its reach, usability, and power. Learn about how we compare to other platforms.