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Celebrating 15 years of BeDataDriven

In February, 2025 we are celebrating the 15th year anniversary of BeDataDriven, the developer and provider of the ActivityInfo platform. Even though ActivityInfo was conceived 17 years ago, in 2008, and was first released in 2009, BeDataDriven was incorporated in The Hague, in The Netherlands, a little later in 2010. In this article, we look back at the history of BeDataDriven as a social enterprise, and discuss its mission, and its future plans.

ActivityInfo before and after BeDataDriven

ActivityInfo was a UNICEF project

Before the incorporation of BeDataDriven, Alex Bertram, Executive Director today, was working with UNICEF in DRC as an Information Management Officer and was responsible for building databases for different projects. Because the existing solutions at that time weren’t adequate for the requirements of each new project, Alex together with colleagues, Damien Lilly and Steven Michel, in UNICEF, decided to build a solution that could be re-used by multiple projects and would cover distinct project needs such as offline availability and web-based access. In early 2009, the first version of ActivityInfo was released and was used by the PEAR (Programme Elargi d'Assistance aux Retournees) program to facilitate multisector assessments and indicator tracking for four partner organizations, AVSI, NRC, IRC, and Solidarites.

The need for the creation of a company

In 2010, the use of ActivityInfo was expanding quickly to more clusters (Education, Nutrition, and NFI) as well as countries with emergencies (Mali, Madagascar) as a solution that was easy to set up and quick to run with. However, at that time, Alex was leaving DRC to move to the Netherlands. To be able to continue to support the users of ActivityInfo but also develop the platform further, Alex established BeDataDriven in The Hague.

This addressed the increasing demand for Alex’s availability, and additional services such as a helpdesk for support, documentation and training on the system, as the company could hire more people to support the users and grow further.

Growing and expanding the use of ActivityInfo

Up until 2015-2016, the company was slowly growing from 5 to 10 people and was offering additional services such as data analysis and consulting. ActivityInfo was designed in such a way that could mainly support secondary data collection analysis, addressing the needs for multi-partner reporting and humanitarian coordination. However, it gradually became apparent that the users' needs were far more varied and the idea of a broader MIS tool, that would support not only working with indicators and secondary data but also with primary data such as personal data (e.g. for tracking beneficiaries) was born. The development of a new version of ActivityInfo started, which had been constantly improving up until 2020 when ActivityInfo 4.0 was released and the company decided to focus solely on developing and providing ActivityInfo.

Today, BeDataDriven is offering ActivityInfo to over 200 organizations of all sizes in more than 100 countries, counting thousands of users, hosting hundreds of projects and millions of records.

The creation of BeDataDriven was the result of the increasing demands of the ActivityInfo users. Because during that time there was no interest by any major donor or regional or HQ offices to fund or acquire the project, applying the emerging SaaS model —which allowed to charge users a yearly fee for access to the software— allowed the continuance of ActivityInfo’s existence and keeping the vision and mission the project idea initially had.

In retrospect, becoming a social enterprise proved to be a model that perfectly aligned with the mission of the people behind BeDataDriven. As a social enterprise, BeDataDriven can be a service provider with clear responsibilities and obligations, and is able to provide predictability, assurances, and the support required by client organizations while staying true to its mission. At the same time, it reinvests any profit on the development and improvement of the platform.

The advantages of this model in comparison to being donor-backed are apparent in the sustainability of the platform and allows long-term planning: it cannot be affected by shifts of investors’/donors’ priorities as it has an independent source of income based on the subscriptions of over 200 organizations. In addition, the company’s incentives are aligned with the users’ incentives, both benefit of a product that provides great quality, improvements, fixes and expansions.

BeDataDriven’s mission in the past and future: Be Data Driven

A mission that came up organically

The choice of the name BeDataDriven reflected the initial mission of the company, that was to make UNICEF and clusters more data driven. Throughout the years and via the development of ActivityInfo, this mission expanded to the whole humanitarian and development assistance sector.

Before focusing solely on ActivityInfo, the BeDataDriven team worked with various organizations via short-term consulting projects, and quickly realized that there were many challenges for an ‘outsider’ to bring real impact and help an organization transform by leveraging data.

First, there wasn’t enough time to both deeply understand the project and the data needs. Then, the learning curve was steep when trying to reach the point of understanding needed to ask the right questions. Lastly, time was too short to affect organizational change and put processes in place and often, valuable insights couldn’t turn into actions because the organization lacked a systematic approach. Another insight gained was that for domain experts to be able to work with data effectively, a high level of skill was necessary and this wasn’t always a given. For example, there was no time for a nutritional expert to become a Python programmer or master all the tools needed to put data together.

These insights enhanced the initial vision and mission of the ActivityInfo project and formed the guiding star for BeDataDriven’s strategy: to bridge the gap between the people who know the right questions to ask from the data and the people with the skills to work with and manage the data via technology. By putting the tools in the hands of the domain expert, the barriers to lasting organizational change that are related to technology can be removed. By offering an easy to use, accessible platform and allowing data to be kept within the same system, we see domain experts and M&E people do the analysis they need without mastering advanced data integration and scripting skills.

A mission to last

Looking into the future, BeDataDriven plans to keep working towards this mission by developing ActivityInfo further and expanding its capabilities while making it accessible to more organizations and the broader social sector. To achieve this, the BeDataDriven team is always looking into the users’ needs, the specialized technology knowledge they are asked to have and the kinds of software they need to use. Based on that the team tries to find ways to keep lowering the barriers to using data.

At the same time, the company plans to keep mitigating the risks that ActivityInfo users face with advanced data security processes, by offering cybersecurity trainings and resources to users to help identify and minimize risks. Last but not least, BeDataDriven will keep investing in training people in the sector on building better information management systems covering not only technology but also people and processes to support the organizational transformation so as to Be Data Driven.