Guide to setting up your new TolaData-SurveyCTO integration

Monitoring & Evaluation professionals, great news: There’s now a way to seamlessly integrate the M&E platform TolaData with SurveyCTO. Although you have always been able to use both tools as part of the same tech stack, this new integration removes the need for manual downloading and importing of SurveyCTO data to get it into TolaData.

Setting this integration up is straightforward and requires just a few steps:

Step 1: Have a SurveyCTO form ready

To set up this integration, you’ll need to have a form in SurveyCTO that you want to collect and stream data from into TolaData.

New to SurveyCTO? Learn how to create your first form.

Step 2: In TolaData: Import your SurveyCTO form

Next, go into your TolaData account and enter your SurveyCTO server and login information into the fields shown in the image below:

Enter SurveyCTO server and login information into TolaData

No need to use your full URL/server address–just the name of the server in which the form you are using lives.

Then: 

1. Click “Data tables” on the lefthand menu.
2. On the righthand menu, under the green “Import table” button, select “SurveyCTO.”

Select SurveyCTO from the options in TolaData’s Data Tables.

3. Once you’ve selected SurveyCTO, you will need to select the SurveyCTO server information you entered previously to begin the import. Please note that TolaData lets you add multiple SurveyCTO forms to your TolaData user profile, but if only one set of SurveyCTO credentials has been added to the TolaData user account, that will appear to be pre-selected.
4. Enter the ID of the form that you want to import from SurveyCTO.
5. Click “Import.”

Your form ID is not the title, it is the unique identifier for your form that you set up when you create it. While the form title can have spaces and can be changed from time to time, the form ID must not contain spaces and remains fixed for the life of the form. The form ID must also begin with a letter, and can only include letters, numbers, underscores, and hyphens (no other punctuation or special characters).

6. Next, you must specify how the import will work technically for this form, as you have some options. You may enable manual updates, or you may enable a webhook. Webhooks are recommended by TolaData, since this will automatically sync data in real-time between your data collection in SurveyCTO, and your M&E data management in TolaData. 

Specify how your data will be imported into SurveyCTO.

7. Make your selection and click “Save.” You have now created a “data table” in TolaData, ready to receive data from your SurveyCTO form. 

Step 3 (webhooks only): In SurveyCTO: Set up webhook

If you are using webhooks, you need to set this up in SurveyCTO.

1. Your first step is getting the webhook URL from the newly-created TolaData data table. Go to the “Settings” tab of the TolaData data table you’ve just created, where you will see a list of instructions for configuring the webhook in SurveyCTO. At the bottom of that list of instructions, you will find your Webhook URL.

2. Copy the Webhook URL, but do NOT click on “Complete” yet!
3. Next, go back into your SurveyCTO account.

4. Click on the “Export” tab and navigate to “New webhook connection.”
5. Name the connection, and paste the “Webhook URL” copied from TolaData into the “Webhook URL” space.
6. Click Save. Only click “Publish existing data” if you want to sync pre-existing data into TolaData–otherwise, make sure that option is not selected. 

Congratulations–you now have a Webhook in SurveyCTO!

Step 4: In TolaData, finalize your webhook

Now, go back into TolaData.

Finish the “New Webhook connection form” by clicking the “Complete” button:

Your SurveyCTO - TolaData integration is now set up! Data collected in your SurveyCTO form will automatically populate data in TolaData.

What your SurveyCTO data can look like in TolaData

Once your data is streaming into SurveyCTO from TolaData, here are some snapshots of what you can expect. Results will vary depending on your own workflow and data, but you can expect to see something similar to the below example.

SurveyCTO form

Data will sync from when you collect it in SurveyCTO, like above, to a corresponding TolaData data table in real-time, like below:

Corresponding TolaData data table

Submissions gathered with SurveyCTO will automatically update their corresponding TolaData data table, like below:

TolaData data table updates from SurveyCTO– later submissions are not visible in this image, but would have continued to update the indicator calculation.

Additional option: configure auto-pulling rules to automatically update indicators based on a SurveyCTO form

There’s more you can do with your SurveyCTO - TolaData integration, if you want! 

In TolaData, you can set up an auto-pulling “rule” for individual indicators that you are tracking for the programs you monitor and evaluate.

This auto-pulling rule defines how the indicator will be calculated, based on a given TolaData data table. Users can choose from a range of calculation methods and logical operators and also work with condition setting. This allows the user flexibility to match the calculation of the indicator to the data structure of the imported SurveyCTO form.

Once an auto-pull rule is set up, your entire data flow is automated from field to dashboard: SurveyCTO submission → updates TolaData data table → updates TolaData indicator(s) → updates TolaData dashboards/reports if you use them.

You can configure an auto-pull rule for as many indicators as you want, so that one SurveyCTO form can update multiple indicators in TolaData.

Below is a screenshot showing an auto-pull rule for an indicator:

And the real-time indicator updates (see the “Collected data” section):

If your data in the SurveyCTO forms stems from different time-periods (e.g. months or years), your indicator data in TolaData will reflect this, which allows an automated periodic analysis of your data. 

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