“We’re not competitor-obsessed, we’re customer-obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”
Jeff Bezos
This quote captures the essence of Dalgo’s journey this year. We’ve met customers, listened to them, worked with them in bootcamps and proofs of concepts, built upon their ideas, tested and iterated on these ideas, and then listened some more. Stepping away from the data and closer to the customers has been at the heart of our endeavours this year.
This hasn’t always been comfortable. We’ve heard about the challenges our customers are having with tasks such as data cleaning. We’ve seen them struggling to use our product. We’ve heard their complaints about complex UIs or missing functionality. We’ve been busy troubleshooting and addressing bugs and pain points. We’ve experienced disappointment when a new feature doesn’t get traction. And we know that even happy customers could be doing so much more with their data … if only our product could help them a bit more.
There have been happy moments as well. Working along with our customers towards Dalgo 2.0, a refined, more ambitious version of Dalgo to more directly address the needs of users in the social sector, and seeing their excitement about the benefits this could bring them. Connecting with NGOs and people across the sector through our various events, and hearing about all their interesting uses of Dalgo and data more generally. Growing our team and refining the way we do product, engineering, sales and marketing, design and consulting. And above all, hearing from our new and existing customers about the ways in which Dalgo has made their lives easier.
Customer Voices
“The introduction of the dashboard has been a game-changer for our team. It has significantly reduced the time spent on compiling data manually, allowing us to focus more on analysis and decision-making rather than repetitive tasks. Earlier, creating reports required pulling data from multiple sources and cleaning it manually – a process that was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. With the inbuilt data transformations in the dashboard, the data cleaning process has become much more streamlined and efficient. Overall, it has improved our workflow, enhanced data quality, and empowered us to respond more quickly and confidently with insights.”
Vinodhini Umashankar, Associate Director – Monitoring & Evaluation at Ummeed Child Development Centre
Read Ummeed’s Dalgo Story for more details
Ummeed Child Development Center serves children with and at risk of developmental disabilities.
As Ummeed expanded its services, the organization faced challenges in unifying data across its Clinical Management System (CMS) and Training Management System (TMS). Through Dalgo, they have been able to integrate these systems, enhancing data accessibility, operational efficiency, and the ability to deliver holistic care.
STiR Education supports government education systems to reignite intrinsic motivation, so that every official, teacher, and child is motivated to learn and improve. Transcriptions of these activities produce reams of free form qualitative data.
“(With Dalgo), irrespective of the questions that come our way — whether from donors or the government — we’re now able to focus much more on building the story, rather than spending time working on the data to build that story.”
Arun M. Selvan, Senior Manager
STIR Education
Stories like these from STIR Education and Ummeed, and these from SNEHA and SHOFCO, are what the Dalgo team lives for.
2025 in Numbers
- 17 -> 24 customers with each new organisation bringing a different perspective on what “useful” means.
- We hosted 10 webinars bringing together NGO partners like Make a Difference, Sanitation and Health Rights in India, Ummeed Child Development Center, STIR Education, to share how and why data shapes their programs. These conversations unlocked direct visibility into how nonprofits actually experience data in practice. Moreover, in November, we partnered with Centre for Data Science and Social Impact to present a webinar on the state of play of data usage within India’s social sector.
- We ran one Dalgo bootcamp attended by 7 organisations with one more planned for January 2026. Two intense days in Bangalore demonstrated how quickly teams can build confidence when they dedicate focused time and commit to learning together. Read Bhumi, Baala and Durga India‘s reflections on the bootcamp.
- We facilitated 2 Dalgo NGO sprints each attended by 6-8 NGOs in Mahabalipuram in January and Bengaluru in September. As always, sprints are a wonderful and dynamic environment for customers to learn from each other, collaborate over noteworthy topics such as storytelling with data, Dalgo monitoring and Dashboard design. These were some of the best times for close interaction with customers giving the team unique insight into the messy realities of day to day data management at NGOs.
- Our team grew from 7 to 11 people adding new roles in marketing, business development and consulting.
Reimagining Dalgo
All of our interactions with NGOs in the sector has just reinforced our mission. 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.
But even though the mission has not changed, we realised that our product wasn’t providing exactly what many in the sector needed. 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. Dalgo 2.0 was born from this.
Evolving the product alone is not enough. We realised that although many many NGOs know that they need to use data more effectively, they weren’t sure exactly how. We weren’t doing a good enough job to identify NGOs who can benefit from Dalgo, and providing simple ways for them to understand what we do and how it can help them.
We have thus invested heavily in business development, education and marketing this year, organising events like bootcamps, small cohort or org-specific training sessions, and also producing accessible content like this video to help NGOs quickly understand what Dalgo can do for them.
Meet Dalgo 2.0
Dalgo’s product evolution is a work in progress, and there’s a lot more to come, but we are proud of what we’ve achieved in 2025. The journey so far has been rewarding as we’ve sought customer input and feedback at every stage. We now have native charting and dashboarding functionality within Dalgo for customers who don’t wish to opt for a separate dashboarding tool like Superset or PowerBI. The product has also undergone a significant design refresh, and excitingly now works well on mobile phones so that users can view and share dashboards on the go. One feature that many of our customers fervently requested and are particularly excited about is native drill down map support for programs running in multiple states and districts.
Watch the demo in the linked video to see the new platform for yourself.
What’s Next
Dalgo 2.0 is still evolving and will rapidly evolve over the next year as we continue to learn from our customers. But some key focus areas for the next year that we are eagerly looking forward to deliver on are:
- Self Service and User Empowerment – To enable users in NGOs to set up pipelines and unlock value from Dalgo without needing intensive technical guidance and handholding.
- Data Conversations and Storytelling – Setting up data for reporting is only the beginning. Data comes to life and has real impact when it is discussed and used within an organisation at all levels day to day. It’s even more powerful when it can inform and assist storytelling to funders and beneficiaries. Our customers have given us many ideas about how Dalgo could catalyse this within their organisations by adding features such as collaborative reports, and qualitative data management and summarisation.
- Looking Beyond Dashboards to Meet Users Where they Are – Not everyone has the time and resources to look at dashboards to analyse data trends. They need timely, relevant data sent to them by email or Whatsapp even when they’re out in the field or busy with other things. Other stakeholders wish to chat with data and get the insights they need that way.
- Strengthening Foundations – All of the above must be built on a solid foundation of security, privacy, robustness and scalability. We will invest even more into all of this in 2026, and also help our customers better navigate their data governance journeys in light of DPDP.
Nonprofits run on trust. Trust runs on data.
Dalgo will continue to help NGOs build this trust, and we strive to live up to your trust in us.
