BSR HERproject Impact Portal

A portal to record surveys and generate reports for their partners.

What?

The HERproject seeks to empower women in the workforce around the world. BSR needed a web portal and mobile app to help interviewers fill out surveys as well as generate reports on the results.

Who?

It helps BSR's partners such as Nordstrom, Samsung, and Target work with factories, suppliers, and other workplaces in developing countries to evaluate the well-being of their workers, especially women.

Why?

Our solution kept BSR from having to manually manage survey responses and generate reports. This reduced errors, saved time, and made the processes more scalable.

How big?

BSR and its partners who represent some of the largest retail goods brands in the world measure work, health, financial, and self-esteem conditions in hundreds of workplaces using the portal and mobile app.

Our Role

Solspace created a Laravel framework powered Portal, where BSR administrators can manage partner accounts, enter survey data, and view reports based on those surveys all in an offline environment.

Neato

The Portal framework offers maximum flexibility on modifying data organization and concepts with time and has the ability to store data offline for later upload once internet access is available.

Helping understand Women's Health, Finances, and Self-Esteem in the Workplace

BSR runs HERproject, an endeavor to help better understand the health, financial, and self-esteem situation of Women in developing countries. BSR approached Solspace with the need to conduct surveys in areas of the world where even internet access may be scarce. Survey data needs to be gathered, stored, and processed to produce reports for BSR's partners in the project.

Data collection was to be conducted on either the portal or on tablets when interviewers were in the field. Most solutions assume an always-connected environment, so this was a unique requirement.

Heart
Laravel development

A close-to-the-metal, fully customized experience

Solspace needed a way to develop a portal and mobile app with maximum flexibility while avoiding having to fight software that uses its own nomenclature and development approach.

The Laravel framework was a perfect fit for this and enabled a portal developed with maximum flexibility while keeping the technical jargon to a minimum. Instead of discussing sections, channels, entries, custom fields, etc., BSR and Solspace could refer to BSR's terms: surveys, questions, answers, workplace programs, reports, etc.

Adapting to changing needs

With maximum flexibility and ample libraries and resources for Laravel, Solspace was able to provide for BSR's needs and adapt the portal to their changing methods.

Certain types of fields that weren't editable could be made editable. Relationships between concepts understood by BSR could be modified with ease. New data models and calculations could be created. APIs can be built. Export of large data sets could be constantly improved. All this is available while keeping the basic concepts in a language understood by BSR.

Api integrations
Robot

Store offline, offload later online

The mobile app had a particular requirement to be able to store survey data on the device while the device was offline, and allow to upload the stored data to the online portal once the BSR staff member returned to an environment with internet access.

Solspace made use of available storage methods available to web browsers, as well as a mobile development framework to detect the online/offline state of the application. We also created an Android app that can store dozens of survey entries while offline, and upload them to the portal later.