Plan, Conduct, and Track Outreach

In close collaboration with farmworker organizations, we built a one-of-a-kind, full-featured web and mobile app for outreach staff to plan, track, and report on farmworker outreach, including routing and mapping capabilities, dramatically saving time and resources.

Challenge

The men and women who pick our fruits and vegetables typically live in substandard housing in hidden locations in rural areas, and lack transportation. The only way health, humanitarian and legal advocates can reach them is by conducting physical outreach to the housing sites.

Conducting outreach to farmworkers involves prioritizing which sites to visit, finding notes from previous visits, and then navigating to these difficult locations. Most organizations utilize a patchwork of spreadsheets, mapping software, and paper notes to cobble together plans and reports, which are difficult to track. Planning takes hours of valuable staff time, and notes lack standardization across teams.

Outcome

Vamos partner organizations across the country now have an all-in-one solution for planning, mapping, tracking and reporting on farmworker outreach. The app is the only one of its kind, and not only was it created in close partnership with farmworker organization, many of the Code the Dream developers who worked on Vamos themselves come from farmworker families, bringing a unique and critical perspective to the development process.

Staff can now easily prioritize where to visit by looking at custom icons, priority colors, and map filtering based on more than a dozen criteria to build routes. The mobile app enables immediate visit write-ups and flagging, and easy exports enable quick summary reporting for sharing with funders. Connecting visit notes directly with mapping software and photo apps makes outreach easier, more efficient, and more effective. Vamos also enables information to be shared more easily between coworkers, helping to retain records across staff members. Additionally, it streamlines data collection and compilation for administrative reporting purposes.

Impact

Vamos enables staff of legal, health, humanitarian, and labor organizations to spend more time talking to their worker constituents and less time on paperwork. Farmworker-serving agencies across the US using Vamos are saving hundreds of hours in outreach planning and they are able to more easily identify which sites to visit based on different priorities. Thanks to Vamos, outreach planning is easier, navigating to labor camps is simplified, information sharing is automatic, and administrative reporting is streamlined. Ultimately, these organizations are now able to serve more people, more effectively.