Overview
A humanitarian organization running field operations across several regions came to us with a workflow stitched together from spreadsheets. Every team kept its own files: field staff logged aid distributions, project managers consolidated numbers for their projects, and HQ tried to assemble the overall picture from all of it. Data moved by copy-paste, file versions drifted apart, and preparing a single donor report took days.
We designed and built an internal platform that became the one place to record everything happening in the field: who received assistance, what kind, where, when and under which project. In essence, it is a CRM/ERP for a humanitarian organization — with roles, reporting and an AI assistant.
The Problem
Field operations for a humanitarian organization mean hundreds of events a month: aid distributions, consultations, trainings, mobile team visits. Behind every event there are specific people, a specific project and a specific donor expecting a report in a defined format.
While all of this lived in spreadsheets, the organization kept running into five recurring problems:
- The numbers did not add up. The same beneficiary could be recorded differently in several files, and totals from different teams contradicted each other.
- Donor reports took days. The sector-standard 5W report (Who, What, Where, When, for Whom) required manually consolidating data from dozens of sources.
- Sensitive data was visible to anyone with the file. Spreadsheets offer no way to separate what a field worker sees from what HQ sees.
- Sharing with partners meant manual copying. Partner organizations received exports with a delay, and every update meant another round of copy-paste.
- Every data question went through IT. A manager who needed to know how many families with children received aid in a given region waited for a technical specialist to pull the numbers.
The Solution
The platform addresses each of these problems with its own module, but all modules work on the same data.
A single beneficiary registry
Each person or household is registered once, with a vulnerability profile by category (for example, people with disabilities, large families, internally displaced persons). This makes it possible to target assistance, avoid duplication and see the full history of interaction with every beneficiary.
Event and partner activity tracking
Every distribution, consultation or training is logged as an event tied to a project, a location and a list of recipients. Partner organizations record their activities in the same system, so HQ sees the picture across all implementers, not just its own teams.
Roles and scoped access
Field staff see only their own organization’s data, project managers see their projects, HQ sees everything. Every change is written to a log: who changed what and when. For donor audits this means the origin of any number in a report can be traced.
Donor-ready 5W reports in minutes
A report in the humanitarian sector’s standard 5W format is generated straight from live data and is ready to download into a donor package. A manager picks the project and the period; the system does the rest.
Automatic data sharing with partners
Instead of manual exports, the platform updates data in Google Sheets on a set schedule. Partners and other stakeholders work with current figures in a tool they already know, without needing access to the system itself.
Data questions in plain language
An AI assistant lets users ask the database a question the way they would ask a colleague: “How many households with children received food kits in September in region X?” The assistant has read-only access, cannot modify or delete a single record, and is available to administrators only.
Technology
The platform is written in Go as a web application that runs in the browser with nothing to install on workstations. Users sign in with their corporate Google account, and data sharing with partners runs through Google Sheets. The AI assistant is built on OpenAI language models. The system is deployed on a dedicated server and updates automatically with every release.
Outcome
The platform replaced the spreadsheet workflow and became the single source of truth for the organization’s field operations.
- Field staff log events directly from the field, on the day they happen
- Project managers produce reports for their projects on their own, without IT support
- HQ assembles donor 5W reports in minutes instead of days
- Data sharing with partners happens automatically, with no manual copying
- Non-technical managers get answers to data questions in plain language
The system runs in production and grows with the organization: a new role for HQ data managers and the partner activities module were added after launch, without downtime and without reworking existing functionality.