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 contact us 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.