Digital tools for an international non-governmental organisation

Development of the ASPIRE platform for Mercy Corps Ukraine

The international humanitarian organisation Mercy Corps Ukraine helps Ukrainians overcome the consequences of war — from providing humanitarian and psychological support to grant support for small and medium-sized businesses. The organisation works through partnerships with local teams, so it implements a significant part of its programmes together with Ukrainian civil society organisations (CSOs), strengthening their expertise with its own resources and methodology.

As part of this strategy, there was a need to digitise the ASPIRE tool — Appreciative Self-Directed Pathway to Institutional Reflection and Empowerment. This is a path of institutional development that helps partners become stronger through in-depth analysis of all areas: from leadership and programmes to finance, logistics and administration.

In collaboration with Mercy Corps experts, we developed a product that transformed methodological recommendations into a live platform. For our CF.Digital team, this project became an important marker of trust: an international organisation chose a Ukrainian agency to develop a strategic digital solution during the war.

What is ASPIRE and why is it important to clients?

ASPIRE is an analytical tool developed by Mercy Corps that helps local partners identify weaknesses in internal processes and opportunities for development.

A key step is a detailed survey of teams. Previously, this process was complex and labour-intensive, requiring a lot of staff time and specific technical expertise to process the data.

Therefore, the value of such a tool for the client is that the results become the basis for individual development plans for each partner CSO. Automating the process has allowed Mercy Corps to abandon manual processing of documents and spreadsheets, which previously required significant time resources.

The value of the platform lies in:

• Autonomy: the results form the basis of individual development plans for each CSO;
• Efficiency: automation has allowed Mercy Corps to abandon manual processing of tables, which previously slowed down the implementation of partner strengthening measures;
• Sustainable development: the tool is designed so that, in the future, partners will be able to use it independently for internal auditing and measuring their own progress.

Transforming methodology into a service

Smart surveys and ONA standards support

One of the challenges was transferring Mercy Corps' existing developments to a new interface. The ASPIRE survey is based on international ONA standards – complex structures with multi-level logic and hundreds of dependencies.

We created a flexible constructor that allows the administrator to upload such a file to the system, and the platform automatically ‘reads’ the structure and builds an interactive tree of questions.

We implemented dynamic logic, thanks to which the system adapts to the respondent's answers. For example, if the user answers ‘Yes,’ the platform can open an additional clarifying question below. If the answer is negative, no additional fields appear. This helps the respondent focus only on what is important and not waste time on irrelevant blocks. We have also added an auto-save feature so that answers are not lost during long-term completion.

Teamwork and role distribution

ASPIRE surveys cover many aspects: from the organisation's mission to complex legal issues. To optimise the process, we have added the ability to distribute blocks. The administrator can assign specific sections to specific specialists: strategy to the manager, reports to the financier. The team works in parallel, which significantly speeds up the finalisation of the questionnaire and makes the assessment process truly collaborative.

Safety and convenience for everyone

The platform is deployed on Azure Cloud infrastructure and meets high accessibility standards:

- Access control: login via a personal link sent to your email and a strict role hierarchy;

- Snclusive design: a clean interface that helps users focus on the content of questions, inclusive fonts, and contrast settings;

- Multilingualism: full support for Ukrainian, English, and Polish.

Conclusion

We have created a convenient online platform that helps Mercy Corps simplify and digitise the complex process of CSO auditing. We have automated the routine part of the team's work with data. Instead of lengthy table processing, the client received a digital system with instant analytics, which is a reliable basis for planning programmes to support the Ukrainian sector.