Building stronger data workflows for teams: Introducing the new KoboToolbox Team management feature

From humanitarian response teams coordinating rapid needs assessments during emergencies to international development organizations managing projects in multiple countries, effective data collection and management requires seamless collaboration across teams and workflows. But many teams face significant challenges to establish and maintain efficient processes for sharing information and centralizing data. Project managers often struggle with limitations related to oversight and user management when team members are forced to operate in silos, resulting in delays, diminished productivity, and potential gaps in data quality.

Based on extensive user research and community consultations, our team at Kobo developed our new Team management feature specifically to address these fundamental data collaboration challenges—providing organizations with the centralized, flexible data processes they need to plan and deliver targeted programming.

Real-world challenges for collaborative data

Large, dispersed teams experience significant data collaboration bottlenecks, from lack of visibility across projects to M&E barriers, resulting in logistical disconnects across projects and often leading to missed opportunities for identifying deeper insights in datasets.

• Lack of visibility across teams: Without a comprehensive view of the activities and data gathered by different projects and team members, project managers often struggle to coordinate efforts across dispersed teams.
• Lack of centralized project and data management: Individual accounts make it impossible to centralize collected data and to manage projects and user plans efficiently, creating barriers for oversight at the team level.
• Lack of centralized progress monitoring: Organizations face real challenges in monitoring project progress, troubleshooting, and measuring impact because they lack centralized data systems.
• Lack of form standardization: Without a central system to manage and share survey questions, teams often create different indicators that make it difficult to aggregate and compare data across projects and regions.

A purpose-built data solution for teams

The Team management feature was designed by Kobo to address the unique data challenges faced by teams, providing essential and innovative features for collaboration and the flexibility needed to optimize data processes—while maintaining high security standards.

The new Team management feature transforms how organizations approach collaborative data collection by centralizing project ownership and providing flexible user and project management capabilities.

Key functionalities and benefits of the Team management feature include:

• Improved visibility across teams: Team Admins and Owners can see data collection and activities across the entire team, enabling better supervision and reducing duplicated efforts.
• Flexible role management: Each team in KoboToolbox has three distinct user roles with different capabilities, including one Owner, unlimited Admins, and unlimited Members.
• Enhanced administrative control: The Owner and Admins can seamlessly configure and control project and user permissions, monitor usage, view Activity Logs for the entire team, and easily invite or remove members—ensuring data processes align with your organization’s security standards.
• Centralized project ownership: All team members’ projects are automatically transferred to the team, and any new projects created by team members are owned by the team—ensuring valuable data and forms are accessible to the organization.
• Streamlined data management: A single Team Projects view enables Owners and Admins to easily manage projects, giving them high-level oversight of all data across the organization.
• Automated management at scale: The Team management feature is fully supported by KoboToolbox’s powerful API, enabling full integration of your team’s projects with Power BI dashboards and limitless external tools for advanced automated analysis, monitoring, and control at scale.

Whether conducting field research, coordinating data across regional offices, or delivering humanitarian aid, KoboToolbox users are already benefiting from the new Team management feature—streamlining collaborative data processes, eliminating bottlenecks, and accelerating results.

“The Teams Plan has enabled us to improve our data protection and security. With centralized, organizational ownership of projects, we can reduce the risk of losing data.” - Michael Elgaard Nielsen, Strategy and Quality Management at DanChurchAid

Getting started with the Team management feature

The Team management feature is currently available to users on our Teams Plan and Enterprise Solutions, which are designed for multiple users, teams, and organizations. Our new Teams Plan gives users access to all of KoboToolbox’s core functionalities, plus higher usage quotas and the new Team management feature.

Benefits of the Teams Plan include:

• Advanced features and functionalities: Access to all KoboToolbox core functionalities, resources, and user support, plus two-factor authentication.
• Higher usage: Enhanced usage quotas beyond individual account limits, with increased limits for transcription, translation, and survey submissions.
• Teams feature: Access to our new Team management feature with one team set up included and the option to purchase additional teams.
• Project management: Flexible role-based project management with different permissions for the Owner, unlimited Admins, and unlimited Members.
• Centralized oversight: Team Projects view for centralized project oversight.

The Teams Plan is designed to be immediately useful, efficiently centralizing your data and team management, while providing room for growth as your organization’s needs expand. With this new offering, users have access to a plan that specifically responds to the needs of organizations and teams using KoboToolbox for data-informed action.

From data collection to collective impact

Data collection is more than just gathering information—it’s creating the foundation for informed action that can deliver lifesaving aid for communities and improve lives. With the advanced functionalities of the new Team management feature, users have the innovative and reliable data solutions they need to transform individual data collection efforts into collective data-driven impact.

Ready to strengthen your team’s data collaboration? Learn more about the Teams Plan or contact our team to discuss how we can support your organization’s data needs.