This blog is a description of the evolution of Dalgo, Project Tech4Dev’s Data platform, towards what we are now calling Dalgo 2.0 or Dalgo for Insights. It describes the evolution of our platform towards serving the nonprofit ecosystem’s data needs more effectively. While this is a product-focused blog, it’s worth mentioning that Dalgo is not just the product — Dalgo is its community of nonprofits, its partnerships, ecosystem education initiatives, consulting engagements, and ongoing support, which come together towards unlocking effective data use for the sector.
Product learning and evolution
When we were working on Dalgo’s launch back in September 2023, we were building a data platform to help nonprofits reliably automate the flow of data to dashboards so they could spend less time uploading, cleaning and computing data from various sources and more time learning from this data.
To date, twenty-five nonprofits have used Dalgo to power dashboards that inform reviews and decisions every day/week/month/quarter/year.
The changes our nonprofits saw looked a little something like this:
- From 25 hours a week of cleaning and computation to 2 hours a week reviewing insights.
- From data only for leadership/funders to data for field, programs, and M&E.
- From manual reports every month/quarter to automated dashboards everyday.
- From disaggregated and inconsistent data to a centralised and reliable source of truth.
- From weak custom pipelines using multiple tools to reliable pipelines on a single enterprise-grade platform.
Give our webinars a watch or our blogs a read if you’d like to learn more.
Alongside this we made a few more observations:
- Most (80%) of the NGOs using Dalgo were large organisations with high data maturity.
- These organisations had a technically proficient team or relied on Dalgo to implement.
- The data and tech teams formed a bottleneck, unable to keep pace with the changes in data collection and visualisation needs of programs and M&E.
- Our nonprofits were now spending a lot of time and effort on ensuring adoption of dashboards throughout the team. Integrating it into NGO specific motions of field monitoring and action, regular reviews, and external reports.
- We needed to evolve to be ‘for nonprofits’ beyond being affordable.
We learned that nonprofits don’t just need automated dashboards—they need data insights to work the way they do—fast‑moving, collaborative, often with limited time and technical capacity. The gap is not just in automation and accessibility but in how easily teams can use it in their daily work to spur action; to tell effective and actionable stories internally and externally.
Dalgo aims to empower nonprofits to use data more effectively — to strengthen program practice, articulate and evaluate impact, and ultimately improve outcomes for their beneficiaries. In doing so, we aim to raise the overall level of data capability and awareness across the nonprofit sector.
In keeping with this vision we would need to evolve further to:
- Serve all nonprofits, not just the large ones.
- Enable use for the upskilling M&E/programs team member, as nonprofits rarely have data/tech teams.
- Provide structure and guidance to focus on key metrics and accommodate changes when required
- Go beyond dashboards to make data useful in everyday situations – storytelling and reporting, field visits, review meetings, and regular monitoring.
- Cater to popular nonprofit use cases, not just nonprofit budgets.
So we started reimagining Dalgo—not as a tool to automate data flow, but as a data platform fulfilling nonprofit-specific data needs. One that fits the rhythm of NGO life, helps teams prepare for Monday reviews, quarterly reports, and funder meetings, and meets M&E teams, program managers, and leadership where they are—not where data engineers are.
This became Dalgo 2.0 – Dalgo for Insights.
(Give Ashwin’s blog a read for a deeper understanding of our evolution)
Dalgo 1.0 to Dalgo 2.0 – From Automation to Action
Dalgo 1.0 was about automation — optimising for time, effort and reliability on dashboards
- It was built for data and tech teams who could write SQL, debug models, and manage orchestration.
- Its key themes were Ingest, Transform, Orchestrate, Visualise.
- It made data flow reliably, but the meaning of that data often stayed trapped in dashboards and depended on rigorous action for adoption and tech teams for update and maintenance.
Dalgo 2.0 is about action — enabling learning and storytelling for every stakeholder
- It’s built for people who hold the story of impact — Leadership, program teams, M&E leads, field teams.
People who want to know/share what’s happening, why, and what to do next - Dalgo 2.0 helps leaders and teams move from tracking indicators to telling stories — stories that connect data to learning, action, and accountability.
- Its new themes — Impact at a Glance, Reports, Dashboards, Charts, Metrics, Data Lineage — reflect this evolution. They bring visibility not just to data points, but to patterns and narratives that shape how organizations learn and grow.
Where We Are Now (November, 2025)
Dalgo 2.0 is now live on insights.dalgo.org (previously dashboard.dalgo.org)
As a first step we have built out native charts, dashboards, and the landing page within Dalgo — developed and tested with six nonprofits during our September sprint and released at the end of October.
The deployment of native dashboarding enables quicker time to insight within the platform and lays the groundwork for upcoming features. NGOs can now easily ask and visualise:
- What are our key metrics this week?
- What’s improving, what’s slipping?
- Who needs to know this, and how quickly?
Dalgo continues to provide Superset for those who prefer it, or the option to connect to any BI tool of their choice. Native dashboarding aims to provide simple, easy, in-platform insights, with enhancements to meet nonprofit-specific needs (ex: drill down maps for the global south)
Dalgo continues to provide all previous pipeline automation and data quality functionality.
In Motion (November 2025 to March 2026)
Building up from our October Release, the next wave of Dalgo 2.0 focuses on making insight generation and interpretation accessible to everyone, not just technical users. These releases are listed in order of priority and certainty.
- Chat with your Dashboards (Production): AI-powered chat that lets you talk to your dashboards and get quick insights in plain language. We piloted this during the sprint, and nonprofits are eager to use this for external (funder/government) dashboards to ease sense-making and reduce back and forth for clarity between stakeholders.
- Integrating Visual Transformation UI (Production): M&E teams can easily clean, combine, and shape their data directly within Dalgo through this interface and handover to technical teams for complex SQL based transformation — enabling interoperability between click-and-create and code bridges a long-standing gap in self-service.
- Stability and scalability upgrades(Production): Dalgo will run faster and smoother. We’re upgrading our infrastructure to enable on-demand syncs. No more waiting in line!
- Reports(Beta): Reports are a single place for your regular reviews — snapshots of your impact dashboards (key metrics, narratives, charts), generated on a fixed schedule. Run the review, log the discussion in Dalgo, tag your teammates, new reports auto-generated for the subsequent months— maintain institutional knowledge across weekly and monthly reviews. Say goodbye to multiple email threads on next steps from your last review.
- Alerts and Sharing(Beta): You shouldn’t have to spend time reading a dashboard everyday to know what actions to take. Set criteria for alerts on Dalgo and get notified on email or whatsapp when something needs your attention. Teams can now spend more time creating impact, the insights will come to them.
- Fine-grained Access Control(Alpha): Improving data governance and clarity of ownership for better collaboration.
Looking Ahead
The work continues. We’ll focus on deepening what works and exploring a few new avenues for the next phase of growth:
- Tiered plans of Dalgo to help nonprofits of varying needs benefit from the platform
- Integration of public datasets to put your impact in context of existing data
- Row-level security for privacy and compliance
- Configurable alerts and metrics for personalized tracking
- Richer reports that blend quantitative and qualitative insights
- AI-assisted onboarding to simplify setup for every new NGO
- Dalgo-provisioned and managed warehouse, if you prefer not to set up your own
- Versioning and traceability for charts, dashboards, reports
Nonprofits run on trust. Trust runs on data.
Dalgo 2.0 is our step toward building a data culture in the social sector where using data for action becomes muscle memory and data confidence increases.
It represents a shift from “tool-building” to “capability-building” — to fund belief, fuel decisions, and keep missions moving
Ultimately, data isn’t just about accuracy. It’s about trust and alignment.
- Trust with funders, when outcomes are visible and contextual.
- Trust within teams, when everyone is working with the same version of truth.
- And trust with communities, when data reflects their lived experience, not just numbers on a slide.
Get in Touch
Dalgo is an open-source data platform developed by Project Tech4Dev. We’re eager to engage with you if you work in the social impact ecosystem.
If you’d like to try Dalgo 2.0
Useful Resources
- Webinar on Dalgo 2.0
- Public roadmap
- Github Repo (We’re an open source Digital Public Good)
- Open issues for contribution
- Youtube
