From clipboard to phone: ICOM's field data collection in Transforma Frei Damião (BNDES Periferias)

To replace paper field collection with phones, the record must be made during the visit, in a flow that validates each field and writes to a single database. In Transforma Frei Damião, from ICOM – Instituto Comunitário Grande Florianópolis (Greater Florianópolis Community Institute), territory liaisons record data on their phones, next to each entrepreneur.

What Transforma Frei Damião is

Transforma Frei Damião – Empreendedorismo e Superação da Pobreza (Entrepreneurship and Overcoming Poverty) is a project of ICOM, the Greater Florianópolis Community Institute, approved under BNDES Periferias. It strengthens entrepreneurs in the Frei Damião community, in Palhoça (Santa Catarina).

One of its deliverables is the Mapa do Empreendedor (Entrepreneur Map), which its own page describes as the first entrepreneur map of the community. Visitors can search for a product or service and filter by type of business, sector, location and time in operation. To have a map like this, someone has to go to each business and ask.

How it was: paper form and typing it up later

Paper field research has a cost that does not show up during the visit. Afterwards, someone has to type what was written, decipher the handwriting, fix what was left blank and put everything into a spreadsheet. By the time the data reaches the database, the field visit is over, and going back to ask again is expensive.

How it is now: the data is born on the phone

In the project, the person making the visit records the answer on a phone, together with the entrepreneur. The blocks CORRE used were:

• WhatsApp chatbot, as the channel for collection and contact.
• Filters, to route each answer according to what was said.
• Databases, where everything comes together, with no parallel spreadsheet.
• Support integrated into the platform, so the team can follow the conversations in one place.
• Email sending, for the follow-ups.

The result is that the database that feeds the map is the same one the team consults. Those who collect and those who decide look at the same data.

Care with community data

Field data is personal data. The LGPD (Law 13,709/2018), in article 6, asks that processing have "legitimate, specific, explicit purposes informed to the data subject" and be limited "to the minimum necessary" (our translation). In practice, this becomes a design rule: only the question that the map or the report will use goes into the form. A field nobody will read is risk without benefit.

What we learned

• The field is the bottleneck, not the database. When the data goes in right, the rest of the process is fast.
• The person collecting needs a simple flow. If the phone form is worse than the paper one, paper comes back.
• Ask only what you will use. Fewer fields reduce errors and reduce LGPD risk.
• One database. Two places for the same data guarantee divergence.

To see the full design of the project, read the ICOM case. If your program has beneficiaries on WhatsApp and a team in the field, the page Programs with WhatsApp shows how CORRE organizes this.