Illustrative: a field officer in an area with no signal completes 40 household visits over a day; all 40 sync automatically that evening back at a connected office.
Data Collection
Offline/mobile collection
Field connectivity is unreliable almost everywhere programmes actually operate — offline capture is not a convenience feature, it is a basic requirement.
Step 1 · Learn
Understand the concept
Programme data is disproportionately collected in places with weak or absent connectivity — rural areas, disaster response contexts, last-mile service points. A data-collection tool that requires a live connection to save a record effectively cannot be used in exactly the settings most programmes work in, forcing a fallback to paper (and a second, error-prone data-entry step later).
Good offline design means a record is considered saved the moment it is captured on the device, with synchronization happening automatically and silently whenever connectivity returns — never requiring the field officer to remember to manually "upload" before they lose signal again.
How METRA GET supports this
The mobile experience installs to a phone and lets a field officer complete forms fully offline. Nothing is lost while offline: records, GPS coordinates and attached photos queue locally and synchronize automatically once the device reconnects.
This is the same underlying data model as the desktop application — an offline-collected record is never a second, separate dataset that needs reconciling later.
From concept to your own project
Offline forms are the exact same forms built in Form Builder — available on mobile automatically, with no separate setup.
Sign in to work with your organization’s real data, or request a demo to see it walked through.
Data Collection
More in this category
Beneficiary/service data collection
The single most common data-integrity failure in programme systems: the same person registered twice, or a repeat visit counted as a new person.
Form Builder
A data collection form is a contract about what "good data" looks like, decided before the first record is captured — not fixed afterward.