If you’ve checked out our website recently, you might have noticed that some things have changed. We have a completely new logo, new look, new ideas behind our work…and even the website is all new!
All of these changes are the result of our our brand refresh, which we’re excited to launch today. We’ve been carefully chipping away at it for over a year now, and we couldn’t be happier with the results.
When we started our brand refresh in late November 2015, we started by answering a seemingly simple question — what makes SocialCops special? We knew that there were lots of possible answers, ranging from our product features to our partners’ experiences. But we soon realized that the most special thing about SocialCops was our very reason for existing.
When we founded SocialCops, we didn’t say that we wanted to build a “big data analytics platform”. Instead, we wanted to use data to help decision-makers make critical decisions and solve important problems. Every single thing we have done at SocialCops was geared towards one purpose — helping our partners make the most accurate decisions possible as quickly as possible.
Introducing Data Intelligence
Today, most data platforms start with the data you already have and add analytics. In doing so, they restrict you to the data that you already have or the data you have been traditionally told you need.
In our work with over 150 partners in the past 3 years, we have fundamentally reversed this process. Instead of starting with the data that someone already has, searching for insights, and making decisions off of whatever insights appear, we work backward. We start with the problem our partner needs to solve, dissect the decision they need to make to solve that problem, and work backwards to find all the data we need to make that decision in the most informed way. The data that a partner already has is never our starting point; it’s merely a means to get to a larger goal.
Maybe it was the problems we tackled in our early days that helped us stumble upon what now feels like an intuitive way of using data for intelligent decision making. In our first years, most of the problems we worked on were in spaces where data wasn’t always readily — like working to identify the root cause of maternal mortality though there was no data to even measure maternal mortality in India, or measuring the efficacy of the Right to Education Act though the data was scattered and hard to make sense of. We never had the luxury of receiving a complete data set and drawing insights from it.
We unconsciously repeated this process with multiple partners — driving rapid village development, tracking national schemes, helping FMCG companies optimize marketing campaigns, and enabling data-driven strategic investments.
Over the past year, we’ve realized that it is this approach — which we call “data intelligence” — that differentiates SocialCops from any other “data company” globally. Data intelligence isn’t just a way to use data — it reimagines the way leaders can make data-driven decisions in complex and rapidly changing environments.
Data intelligence is about opening up the idea of what data should be used, and thinking about all the possible data you need (rather than just the data you have) to make the best decision. It’s about looking for data in places where people may never have looked before. Data intelligence allows leaders to focus on solving problems; meanwhile, it works behind the scenes to give leaders all the information they need in the most simple, intuitive way possible.
Introducing our Data Intelligence Platform
Instead of isolated data products, we now have a unified platform at SocialCops that covers any decision from start to finish. Our platform was built around the idea of data intelligence, and it makes it easy to use data intelligence to drive any decision in any organization.
After defining the decision we want to drive, our platform starts by bringing together all the data we need. It starts by gathering internal data from scattered systems, then it adds intelligence to this data with external data from Access, our data repository with over 600 public data sources. Next, to fill the gaps in this data, we collect new data from the field with Collect, our mobile-based data collection product. Our platform brings together all this data, then merges, cleans, and transforms it into a unified data set on Transform, our internal data cleaning product. And finally, key insights from this data are visualized on simple, intuitive dashboards through Visualize.
Introducing our New Logo and Visual Brand
Leaders today often have to drown out a lot of noise and chaotic data while making big decisions. Data intelligence is about bringing order to this chaotic world of data so our partners can focus on what is most important in making a decision.
Thus, during our brand refresh, the idea of a logo that symbolized drowning out this unnecessary peripheral noise and focusing on what’s really important really resonated with the team. We started searching for a new visual, something that would help us emphasize this focus. This search led us a symbol that worked well in this context — a frame.
The frame allowed us to emphasize how we help partners focus on the most important pieces of information — the data and insights that are actually useful. We then decided to partially open up the frame to showcase the adaptability of our work and platform. This frame will act as a glue that binds our various products together in one visual identity.
In just the past year, data intelligence and our platform has helped us play a role in empowering key decision-makers and leaders with the data they need to solve big problems effectively — helping the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invest $8 million in Indian agriculture, working with Niti Aayog to track KPIs for India’s 89 national ministries, and partnering with the Tata Trusts to drive rapid village development across India. We’re just getting started and are extremely excited about what the future holds for us, for data intelligence, and for the world!
2 comments
Nice work and growth in the right direction.
My father is panchayat raj minister now at andhra pradesh , listened a lot about prukalpa garu , recently we adopted a village and transformed it to digital village apparently all the households today are using rupee cards at retail shops , as my father spearheads the team at rural area we can collectively do some thing good for them , I don’t know what kind of support I have to ask but I can understand some support is needed from you .