Program staff and first mile workers have deep, tacit knowledge about the communities they work in and the effectiveness of your program.
‘Stories from the Ground’ is a mobile friendly solution that allows individuals to capture nuanced experiences about people, places and activities.
'Stories from the Ground' will help with various facets of work in your organisation
Stakeholder Communications
Share a compelling and nuanced narrative of the impact of your program. Do this by leveraging first hand accounts of stories of change, and showcasing the extraordinary efforts taken by your team.
Program Management
By supporting your team members to share stories of their work, nuanced input can be easily gained on small shifts that the program needs and help in improving processes to further enable impact.
Sensemaking & Learning
Annotate and tag insights in the stories added by program staff, and access this data in the form of analysis dashboards. This knowledge from the ground can help you make programmatic decisions based on data.
The product powered by the Open Knowledge Framework, uses a number of features to make storytelling, reading, analysis and sharing easy and user friendly
Story templates on your platform will support field staff with hints to help them think through and tell richer, more meaningful stories.
Prices mentioned for small to medium sized programs. International prices exclude relevant taxes.
For organisations such as funders, NGOs, large scale programs and others please get in touch for pricing
Add-ons
Add these features to your package at an additional cost
Additional Templates
Make the template available in languages other than English, or have multiple templates based on program, outcomes or other factors.
Additional Collection Pages
There are some standard collection pages that are included with the product to begin with. But programs are unique, and you can get custom collections as well.
WhatsApp Chatbot
Support your team to contribute stories directly through a WhatsApp chatbot integration with your platform
Newsletter Integration
Set up a newsletter template to share your stories regularly with stakeholders straight from your platform.
Training for Storytelling
We help you train your teams to build skills and a culture around storytelling in your organisation.
Other Customisation
We collaborate to understand your organisation’s needs and add the required features from the larger Open Knowledge Framework
If you have any questions or are interested in working with us, write to us at hello@ooloilabs.in
Our Process
We follow a process with our partners to understand program needs, and translate these into the platform. We then work closely with team leaders to onboard their team, offering longer term support through the duration of the year.
Mapping and Understanding Program Needs
Setup, Customisations, Testing
Onboarding
High Touch Support and Training
Low Touch Support
Week 1+2
Week 3+4
*without customisations
Week 5
Week 5-12
Week 13-52
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Is this product self-deployable?No, the product is not self-deployable like on a platform like wix or squarespace. We work closely with partners to understand needs carefully, and then configure the backend to set up your version of the product on a domain of your choice. After that we work with your team for onboarding and training around the use of the product, providing support thereafter for the rest of the year.
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Is it an app?The product is designed mobile first, so it works well in the browser, and as a web app offers certain limited offline functionality. Your version of the product would have your branding and be accessible on a domain or subdomain of your choice for example: stories.yourdomain.org.
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How many people can use the platform?The product is very scalable, although the price quoted above assumes small to medium sized organisations. For larger organisations the price would change a bit to account for scaled up server requirements.
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Whose data is it?The responsibility and ownership for the data is completely on the organisation whose platform it is. We do not claim any ownership on the data, or share it with any person, organisation or platform for other uses.
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Does it have to be an open platform? Can it be private?The platform doesn’t have to be open, and can be setup to be accessible only through a login. In fact, based on the login and the user role assigned, different groups of users can have access to restricted features and pages.
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Can we add photos, video and audio?Yes! You can directly upload photos and audio through the templates. For videos, given the varying large sizes possible on mobile phones today, we have made provisions for embedding videos from services such as YouTube. Your team member will have to upload the video on YouTube, and then embedding using the link. For use cases where video is critical, we can work on customisations when doing the initial scoping.
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If my team is writing in different languages how will people from other regions/countries read them?In our work over the past few years, we’ve realised that for maximum comfort for field and program teams to write stories, they must be encouraged to do so in the script and language in which they are comfortable. But that leads to a challenge around translation. Over the next two quarters we will be integrating AI translation models to aid reading of stories by teams irrespective of the language they’re in.
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What happens after the first year?The pricing shared above is for one year. In our work with other organisations, we do so through a close collaboration, believing that support is a must. Beyond the first year, partners can choose to continue with an annual contract which would include hosting, support and new features and updates as they get pushed. Some partners might choose to discontinue the annual contract if they feel that they don’t need support, and we can shift the system to be self-hosted. In that case, there would be a small handover cost, and set up so that the organisation pays for Google Cloud and other services directly.
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Is this product open source?The product is built on the Open Knowledge Framework by Ooloi Labs. The framework is not open source at the moment, but it is in our roadmap to make the project open source next year, and we are in the process of working out the details. Watch our linkedin or subscribe to our newsletter for announcements.