mFieldwork Mobile App

mFieldwork launched a mobile data capture platform in May 2013 to address the lack of enterprise solutions available to humanitarians. We wound down the service in August 2018. While it ran, the service had thousands of dedicated users in 14 countries collecting millions of data points.

The inspiration for the MDC platform was the need for humanitarian organizations to move into the digital age and we set out to build a platform to provide the humanitarian sector with a secure mobile data capture system that reflected their structure and ways of working. We succeeded and received great feedback, particularly on our user management approach and dashboards. Suggestions and input from our users was a driving inspiration throughout.

We also learned that our intended business model wasn’t commercially viable. While there were always funds for consulting and customization, we wanted to dial that back to invest in a high quality low cost common solution for the industry. We found that these are much harder dollars to win at scale. There is a lot of competition in this space, particularly at the freemium tier, and our platform’s emphasis on data security, dashboards and workflows for humanitarians wasn’t enough to generate the consistent software related revenue needed for sustainability.

As sad as it was to close a chapter, we’re still super happy about everything we accomplished and the awesome projects we were involved with via the mFieldWork mobile data capture platform. Digital data capture is just the first step in the important digital transformation of our industry. mFieldWork is committed to helping organizations digitally transform their information management processes, including the implementation of mobile data capture. Don’t hesitate to reach out for help.