Guest post by Hana Paskova
I am a soon-to-graduate Economics and Sustainability student from Minerva University, and for fall 2024, I was the Data & Systems Fellow at Solar Sister. I worked on several exciting projects that helped further my understanding of the role of data collection for nonprofit organizations and how crucial it is for Solar Sister as well. The biggest project that I worked on was debugging and polishing a KoboToolBox form, which will be used by SSEs in Tanzania to collect data on their activities of renting solar fishing lights and selling energy from solar mills.
Working with KoboToolBox was new for me. I debugged the form, which presented an exciting challenge in understanding the specifics of field formatting and relational logic in KoboToolBox. This was, however, only one part of the work. I also had to make sure the form was user-friendly, thinking not only about data collection from the back end but also the front end. Hence, iteration and getting feedback from others on the form were crucial to ensure the form was optimized for its use. The user-friendliness was further emphasized by creating a document to help SSEs register for KoboToolBox. This was a learning process for me and helped me empathize with those seeing the form and KoboToolBox for the first time and understand what information they need (not always the most straightforward task after working on the form for a while).
The registration user guide is only one of the tasks that enhances the form’s usefulness. Another was mapping the form fields to objects in Salesforce to prepare them for further integration, and I also began to write out a basic code for the integration in OpenFN. This will, in the future, ensure the collected information is in the space that is central for Solar Sister’s data collection—Salesforce.
Following this project, I worked on mapping object relationships in Salesforce. I rewrote the information from Schema to Excel to ensure it is more accessible and that objects without relationships to others get highlighted. This way, the document can be further used by others to navigate Salesforce and can help simplify the use of Salesforce objects in future forms. This part was interesting for me to work on as it is something that will have an impact only in the future and not immediately.
The next step for the data collection from the KoboToolBox form will be integrating that data into Salesforce through OpenFN to ensure that all the data is in the central spot. I would recommend Solar Sister take this opportunity to compare KoboToolBox and TaroWorks. Determining which tool is more suitable for general Solar Sister Entrepreneur data collection could lead to a preference of one over the other or to continuing to use both just for different purposes. It is an opportunity for streamlining data collection and intentional use of tools.
Overall, I have enjoyed working at Solar Sister and learned valuable insights about data collection, relational logic between objects, form user-friendliness, and streamlining data processes.