Founded in 1993, Itaú Social is one of the largest organizations dedicated to improving the public education sector in Brazil. Its work involves training education professionals, strengthening civil society, and conducting research in the education sector. Partnering with the government, private sector, teachers, and civil society organizations, Itaú Social works to ensure that everyone can have access to quality education without limitations, operating under two pillars: training of education professionals and strengthening civil society.
Itaú Social leads 12 programs, each with multiple projects and stakeholders across Brazil. While the organization has long been committed to monitoring and evaluating program results to inform program planning and decision-making, Itaú Social had multiple systems to monitor different programs, projects, and initiatives. Internal staff had to spend hours manually pulling data, creating charts, organizing dashboards, and compiling spreadsheets to present program progress and organizational impact to the Board. Itaú Social sought a more efficient way to input, track, and measure its impact to simplify reporting as well as improve program design and delivery for participants.
Itaú Social began working with Vera Solutions in 2018 to design a centralized, cloud-based M&E system using Amp Impact, Vera Solutions’ packaged impact measurement and portfolio management solution on Salesforce. The new system enables Itaú Social to enhance data collection quality and efficiency across programs, improve data consistency at all levels of the organization, and significantly reduce the time and effort needed for impact reporting.
In early 2019, Vera Solutions began implementing a pilot M&E system for two of Itaú Social’s education programs. After a successful pilot, Vera scaled the solution to cover more than 100 projects across 12 different programs, making Amp Impact the central location for Itaú Social to input and access organization-wide M&E data. Program partners can now enter data themselves through an online, single-sign-on portal built using Salesforce Experience Cloud — freeing staff from manually receiving and processing all the data, and using reports to view the accuracy and completion of their project details.
Through Amp Impact, Itaú Social can compare all of its projects across a standard set of indicators. Vera Solutions collaborated with Itaú Social to build customized indicators per program — from overarching indicators such as number of beneficiaries and constituents per geographic region to indicators disaggregated by gender and race. Program partners can select relevant indicators from a catalog and enter qualitative, binary, or quantitative results. After entering data, program partners can view autosaved results as charts or results dashboards, which can easily be exported to share with external partners rather than manually creating charts themselves.
One of Itaú Social’s most important functional requirements was the ability to enter and view attendance for school teachers participating in the “Melhoria da Educação” (Improvement of Education) program. Vera Solutions worked with the program team to design an Attendance Page within the system using a set of custom Salesforce Lightning components, enabling Itaú Social to assess the effectiveness of training sessions in real-time and pivot decision-making as necessary. In the next phase, Vera Solutions plans to expand the attendance tracking page to other projects that can benefit from this functionality.
“Vera was a partner with great capacity for listening, analyzing demands, and proposing development solutions. They delivered fast service and clarity in communication.”
– Social Programs Analyst, Itaú Social
By implementing a central database for all of its M&E data, Itaú Social no longer has to spend countless hours sorting through data. The organization now has access to all of its program data within seconds, rather than weeks — freeing it to focus on what really matters: working to help every student achieve success in Brazil. Vera Solutions continues to be inspired by Itaú Social’s extensive work to transform the future of education in Brazil, and looks forward to continuing the partnership to help the organization better measure and report on its impact.