Lebanese Red Cross Uses ArcGIS Apps to Manage Humanitarian Aid Projects

The Lebanese Red Cross (LRC) has 40 stations throughout Lebanon from which it performs over 1,200,000 acts of humanitarian assistance each year. Work is often performed in disconnected environments and mostly by volunteers. LRC was using an open-source package for data collection. Using open-source tools requires some technical expertise, so quickly creating surveys for use by nontechnical volunteers was a problem. Further, the surveys had performance limitations in areas with no connectivity. Then, there were difficulties managing the data captured from separate surveys; using it for analysis and reporting relied on manual processes and had become unacceptable. LRC sought a more efficient data collection solution that would streamline workflows.

LRC began using ArcGIS Survey123 for data collection because it offered a flexible framework for building surveys, from simple to complex. It allowed survey behaviors to streamline the data capture process. Volunteers at the 40 LRC stations used tablets to efficiently complete surveys for their projects—blood donor recruitment, refugee health assessment, and many others. Using Survey123 enabled data from disparate surveys related to a single focused project to be managed in ArcGIS. Feeding Survey123 data into ArcGIS Dashboards provided stakeholders real-time insight into project activities, their status, and performance results to support decision-making. The data also was used in ArcGIS for Power BI for analysis and for reporting across all LRC departments.

Using Survey123 enabled LRC to streamline many different and formerly disconnected workflows. The challenges of collecting data in remote environments was met by the Survey123 offline data collection capability, so workers remained productive and effective at all times. LRC saved volunteer training time because the Survey123 surveys were so easy to use. Feeding real-time data collected from disparate surveys into ArcGIS for Power BI provided improved project reporting across all LRC departments, supporting their varied information needs for decision-making. Project management was also significantly improved with the live Operations Dashboard to view project performance in real time. LRC project data is now more complete, accurate, accessible, and integrated.