Strength India is a nonprofit organization founded by two friends and business partners, Tara Celli and Kiran Pal, in an effort to explore, design, and implement preventative solutions for women and girls in Uttar Pradesh, India. Since their establishment in 2015, they have conducted after-school mentorship programs with girls from a violent home environment. These programs focus on helping young women develop social and emotional learning skills while offering diverse activities from self-defense training, to reading circles, and field trips to enrich the lives of every participant.
Through Strength India’s direct outreach work with women from diverse yet universally disadvantaged backgrounds in Northern India, they realized that many common understandings and oft-quoted statistics about these women were either misguided or flat-out wrong. However, in today’s heavily data-reliant world, anecdotal observations were not enough. Harder statistical data were needed in order to support their observations and claims. This is when it was decided that Strength India would perform a research study of the women’s daily experiences, and record it digitally for deep analysis and the potential for publication. They just needed to find a tool that can help deliver these results that support their hypotheses
Rural Data Collection – Possible With QuestionPro
From a logistics standpoint, Strength India knew they needed to spend significant time in the field with their subjects. Internet access is not a universal reality in rural India. Beyond basic infrastructure, women lack the educational access which would be necessary to take the survey, therefore, surveyors needed to be on the ground actively engaging with all participants. After researching several tools, Strength India took advantages of TechSoup’s partnership with QuestionPro and found the offline application to be the perfect solution. QuestionPro helped solve the issue of lack of internet with the use of the offline app, and it enabled surveyors to go directly to their subjects and engage them one-on-one, collecting data that very few researchers have gained access to in the past.
Results and Plan of Action
Over the span of seven months, Strength India was able to go door to door over with QuestionPro and speak with over 2,600 women about the real-life barriers they face when attempting to use and access commercial menstrual hygiene products. With the information collected, Strength India is launching a sanitary napkin brand called (em)PowerPads that addresses many of the concerns that were able to confirm through their research project. They will offer 3 kinds of resealable packages with 7 to 12 ultra-thin, individually-wrapped sanitary napkins in 4 sizes and make them accessible through their organization. The goal in the near future is to make these packages fully customizable for each women’s individual needs.Through the establishment of connecting with participants in the region, Strength India is able to continue their relationship by building a distribution network that will ensure the (em)PowerPads will find their way into woman’s’ hands every month. We encourage you to watch the video by Strength India to view their findings that were validated by their research study.
Accessing Industry Best Tools Through TechSoup and QuestionPro’s Partnership
As a bootstrapped-funded organization, Strength India was not sure if they could find a tool that could meet their unique needs at an affordable price point. Through their partnership with TechSoup, they were thrilled when they saw that QuestionPro was part of the technology solutions offered. This enabled them to access the industry’s best offline survey tool that includes hands on customer service and 24/7 support.
“Our loyalty to QuestionPro was sealed when Harshad, our account representative, provided us with really excellent customer service. As a small startup in the humanitarian and social enterprise space, it has been extremely rare for us to find such attention and an honest desire to help us achieve our goals-a standard up to which QuestionPro has never failed to perform. We will never be able to fully and adequately express how much we appreciate our partnership with QuestionPro “ – Tara Celli, Co-Founder, Strength India.
We are extremely proud to be a valued partner with Strength India, and are looking forward to continue to support their mission by providing the best survey and data collection platform in the industry. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about our nonprofit solution, please reach out to us today.
