As a service provider or survey firm, you may have encountered prospective or current clients who wanted to learn more about the opportunities afforded by digital data collection. To help you make the case for digital data collection, we’ve created the resources below from the perspective of a service provider. Feel free to adapt these materials when discussing SurveyCTO with your clients.
ON DATA QUALITY
Enumerators use mobile phones and/or tablets/iPads powered by SurveyCTO, the most advanced technology platform available for efficiently collecting high-quality data. Digital survey forms are pre-programmed to reject or confirm responses that look out-of-range or otherwise incorrect, and to automatically include, skip, or customize questions based on earlier responses. GPS positions are used to confirm and track survey locations. Corroborating photos are taken and reviewed when appropriate, as are video clips, audio recordings, and respondent signatures.
Random audio recordings are used to quality-check survey administration, and our enumerators never know when they are or aren’t being recorded. We can even program surveys to automatically track when enumerators are moving through a survey form too quickly and invisibly record audio to facilitate later review.
Because the data comes in every day, we can review the data for potential signs of trouble, follow up, and correct potential problems right away. We even configure automated quality checks to review the full dataset nightly and flag potential problems — such as an enumerator whose responses systematically differ from those of other enumerators.
We can also offer you unprecedented real-time access to key data in Google dashboards, all of the raw data, and even audio recordings and other quality checks as it comes in from the field.”
ON DATA SECURITY
“SurveyCTO also allows us to collect and manage your data using unprecedented security measures, which ensures that any sensitive and identifying data we are collecting on your behalf is well-protected, your respondents’ privacy is maintained, and your project meets IRB and human subjects ethical guidelines it needs to follow.
Our cloud server, powered by SurveyCTO, is hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers that utilize the strongest firewall technology available and are monitored 24/7. The servers have been audited and are compliant with various global security standards, including SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, IRAP, FIPS, FedRAMP, and many others. (The full list of certifications can be found here.) AWS data centers are also protected by physical guards and CCTV at all times.
In addition, all data in transit (for example, data sent from devices in the field to our SurveyCTO cloud server or data downloaded from our cloud server to your or our computers) is encrypted using industry-leading Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. In addition, we are able to use a 2048-bit public/private key pair to encrypt data at rest. As soon as a survey is completed on a device, it is fully encrypted using the encryption key. The data remains encrypted while resting in the cloud servers and even the SurveyCTO engineering team is unable to access or view the data. Only we can decrypt the data after we download it onto our computers, using a private decryption key that only we possess.
For clients that require an additional layer of security, we are also able to offer cold-room support: downloaded data will first be transferred to a computer that is completely disconnected from the internet and will only be decrypted and viewed on that computer.”
ON TURN-AROUND TIME
“Your data is available as soon we collect it. Compare this to a paper survey where data must be entered into the programmed template by trained data-entry operators. For each form or questionnaire, typically two entries are completed, they are compared, and any differences between the two are corrected. Depending on the scale of the project, data entry can take weeks or months.
With SurveyCTO, project data is available for analysis as soon as data collection is complete.”
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Follow these links to learn more about:
- Choosing between digital and paper data collection
- SurveyCTO’s security and reliability features
- Working with institutional review boards
If you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at sales@surveycto.com.
