Vamos Outreach App
Designed in partnership with farmworker service and advocacy organizations, Vamos Outreach is a mobile and desktop app that assists outreach workers in planning, finding, conducting, tracking and reporting on outreach visits to migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Vamos is currently being used by organizations in nine states across the country.
2023 Vamos Access Mini-Grants: Scroll down to the “Cost” section to learn more about new mini-grants providing access to Vamos for 10 new organizations!
Ready to start using Vamos? Click here or scroll down for the contact form.
What is Vamos?
Vamos is a tool for outreach staff to plan, conduct, and track outreach to migrant & seasonal farmworkers. Using Vamos, organizations can import or create “Sites” (labor camps or houses where farmworkers live), “Groups” (collections of sites, like “Janeth’s camps for follow-up” or “Camps near our office”), plan “Routes” that connect directly to Google Maps, write up “Visits” (reports on trips made to a site), “Notes” (information or alerts that need follow up, color coded by priority), and identify “Contacts” (like growers or contractors) associated with each Site.
Vamos was created in close partnership with farmworker-serving organizations and continues to be updated based on regular feedback from those partners. Several of the software development apprentices who work on Vamos grew up in farmworker families themselves. Their experiences contribute to a one-of-kind app which uniquely meets the needs for farmworker organizations.
Features of the Desktop App
Check out a demo of the web app! (9 minutes – or see below for a 3 min version)
There is a web app (for use on a desktop computer) for staff to plan their outreach trips. “Managers” can register users and assign roles, like “Planners” and “Users” for Volunteers, that have different levels of permissions. Approved staff have the ability to:
- Bulk upload all the organization’s Sites via csv
- Create and edit new Sites and Groups
- View the organization’s Sites as a map, table, or cards
- View priority status and active/ inactive status via color coding directly on the map
- Add and assign searchable “Contacts” to each Site, like Growers and Contractors
- Customize the fields available for Sites, Visits, and Contacts, to mirror the information collected on your organization’s own Outreach and Employer Information Sheets
- Utilize Advanced Search to find Sites based on criteria like County, Arrival & Departure dates, Contact, Priority status, H2A, if the camp was visited yet this season, and more
- Create Routes for each outreach trip, and print directions in case of limited cell connection
- View Visits and Notes from previous outreach trips
- Add custom items that are regularly donated or distributed from your organization, for easy tracking later
- Adjust the exact location of a site by dragging a pin on the map
- Generate basic reports by exporting Site, Visit, Note data.
Features of the Mobile App
Check out a demo of the mobile app! (3 minutes)
Available on iOS and Android, Vamos Mobile was built for approved staff and volunteers to use while they are conducting outreach in the field. From within the app, users can:
- View Sites near your current location, or view Sites as a list or on a map
- Search for Sites by name, county, city, priority level, or Group
- Adjust the exact location of a Site from within the map
- Access pre-created Routes for a given outreach trip
- View descriptions, directions, and photos of a Site from the app
- Navigate to Sites directly from your phone’s map apps
- Add new Sites, including details about number of workers, arrival dates, description of entrance, etc.
- Track details of Visits, including donations of items
- Make “Notes” to flag key concerns, and assign priority status
- Take or upload photos of Sites directly from within the app
- View details of previous visits
- View all Contacts associate with that Site (e.g. growers or contractors).
Vamos Offline Mode is expected to be complete by mid-summer 2023, which will enable users to access Sites and enter in Visit information even if there is no cell signal whatsoever.
What Users Have to Say
Since starting to use Vamos for our outreach visits to farmworkers in Eastern North Carolina, it has already increased the effectiveness of our outreach efforts. We use the web app to plan our outreach, and we use the mobile app to locate labor camps, track our visits and donations, and make notes about anything that needs attention. Thanks to the app, our work is more efficient and productive. It used to take hours to plan outreach; now it only takes a few minutes!
Lariza Garzon, Episcopal Farm Worker Ministry, North Carolina
Over the course of the last couple years, Vamos has completely reshaped how we do our farmworker outreach. In a world before Vamos, outreach planning was complex and time-consuming—it required advocates to sift through dozens of folders and spreadsheets to create routes. Now, all of our outreach notes are organized and at our fingertips, planning routes takes only a fraction of the time, and the mobile app allows us to adjust quickly on the road while visiting farmworkers. We have a much more efficient outreach operation because of Vamos.
Thomas Power, Pennsylvania Farmworker Project
The Vamos App is poised to transform the way that we plan outreach and collect data. We could not be more excited to streamline our efforts in order to maximize our ability to form a fruitful relationship with our client base.
Mario Solis and Elise Riveness, the Agricultural Worker Project, Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services
Cost
Developing and maintaining complex mobile apps like Vamos requires significant time and resources on the part of our software developers. We want this technology to be accessible and affordable to groups doing important work to improve the lives of farmworkers, so we are willing to work with groups as much as possible though a sliding scale cost for nonprofit organizations. In 2023, the cost is between $200 – $500 per month (or $2000 -$5000 per year) per organizational subscription to use and maintain Vamos. For organizations that cannot afford this range, please let us know and let’s see what we can work out. We want to make sure the groups who need it can use it.
For entities that are not nonprofit organizations, or for groups that may need more than 5-10 users, contact us for pricing.
2023 Vamos Access Mini-Grants
July 2023: Code the Dream is now able to offer mini-grants for access to the Vamos Outreach app to ten new organizations! A donor to Code the Dream who deeply cares about farmworker issues wants to make Vamos more accessible to more groups serving workers. This very generous donor is covering almost the entire cost of the app for ten new organizations that want to join Vamos. To apply for the 2023-24 Vamos Access Mini-Grants, please fill out the same form that you use for official Vamos registration (note this is a different form from the Vamos Interest Form, below), and check the Mini-Grant box where indicated.
Brief Vamos Demo
Here’s a 3-minute demo that highlights why farmworker outreach is a critical task, why it’s so challenging, and how Vamos helps organizations save valuable staff time by using the app to plan and track outreach.
Want your staff to use Vamos? Contact us.
Below you will find an embedded form to fill out to indicate your interest in Vamos and/or scheduling a demo. If you already know you want your organization to become an official Vamos partner, and/or to apply for the 2023 Vamos Access Mini-Grant, you can go ahead and fill out the Registration form here.
About Code the Dream
Code the Dream offers free intensive training in software development to people from diverse low-income backgrounds. In CTD Labs, our coders work with experienced mentors to hone those skills by building apps and technology platforms for a range of startups, nonprofits and government clients. The ultimate aim of Code the Dream is to create a unique win-win, where our coders gain real experience building apps that make the world a little better place, and then use that experience to launch new careers with enormous opportunity for themselves, their families, and their communities.
Several of Code the Dream’s apprentice software developers come from farmworker families. One of the early developers was a DACA recipient from Mexico who lived with her family in single-room migrant farmworker housing for several years. Of all the Code the Dream projects she worked on, she felt particularly connected to this app because of her family’s work in agriculture. She knows firsthand the challenges the workers experience and she cares deeply about their struggles.
Learn more about how Vamos from started the idea of a software engineer volunteering with our original partner, the Episcopal Farm Worker Ministry, in this blog post.