What is Compyle and What Can You Accomplish with the System?

By: Christian Ragland
January 17th, 2023

Clear Impact offers two software solutions for organizations looking to expand their impact using data: Scorecard and Compyle. These systems serve different purposes but work together to provide a complete set of data collection, management, and impact strategy tools for organizations of any size. This blog dives more deeply into what you can accomplish with Compyle.

Table of Contents:

1. What is Compyle in a Nutshell?
2. Functionality #1 and #2: Get Organized With Participant and Organization Tracking
3. Functionality #3a: Data Collection…Your Way!
4. Functionality #3b: Get More Detailed With Custom Data Fields
5. Functionality #4: Improve Your Systems and Services With Analytics
6. Final Thoughts
7. Helpful Links

What is Compyle in a Nutshell?

Compyle is a data collection software that allows organizations to capture any information they want about people. People may include staff members, individual donors, program participants, community members, or others. Compyle offers four main functions that organizations need to make effective data-informed decisions: participant management, organization tracking, data collection, and analytics. If an organization chooses to purchase the full Clear Impact Suite, Compyle can automatically feed collected data into the Clear Impact Scorecard for further analysis and planning.

Functionality #1 and #2: Get Organized with Participant and Organization Tracking

Whether an organization wants to track staff, individual donors, program participants, community partners, focus group participants, or others, Compyle offers a comprehensive system for managing and organizing individual people. These individuals are known as “Participants” in the software. Compyle users can access all their participants in one place or organize and view them in “Groups” of individuals with similar characteristics. Organizing participants into Groups allows users to find the information they need more quickly, make more targeted programmatic improvements, and quickly identify patterns. Users can create an unlimited number of Groups to organize their participants. 

The following are just examples of ways an organization could group participants together:

• Individual donors from a specific geographic location
• Program participants organized by racial or ethnic groups, income, gender, location,  education level, survey responses, etc.
• Program participants organized by program completion status
• Staff members organized by department
• Community members organized by survey completion or focus group participation
• Individuals organized by a combination of any desired variables (eg. program participants organized by age and gender as opposed to age or gender alone).
• The options are limitless!

When looking at individual participants, users can see which Groups each person belongs to, which programs they are involved in, and all of their key data, including survey responses, notes, and associated documents.

Finally, similar to Participant tracking, Compyle allows organizations to track organizational partners and grantees. Organization tracking is the easiest and fastest way to track grantee success because it allows users to view outcomes, notes, documents, and history for individual organizations and organize them into Groups for further analysis. 

Functionality #3a: Data Collection…Your Way!

With Compyle, an organization can collect virtually any piece of information they want in a variety of ways:

• Staff can enter data manually for an individual
• Staff can enter data manually for a group of individuals
• Participants or other individuals can enter their information via custom forms, surveys, etc.

With custom forms, an organization can disseminate and collect grant applications, surveys, registration forms, consent forms, tests, quizzes, assessments, and more. Compyle’s form creation wizard is easy to use while still allowing complete customization. By offering a large range of custom question-and-answer types, organizations can use this tool however they see fit. Think of Compyle forms as a combination of Google Forms and Survey Monkey!

Here are some examples of form fields and questions that Compyle forms offer:

• Long-form and short-form descriptions
• Multiple Choice
• Number Ranges 
• True/False
• Time and/or date
• Custom Calculations
• Other custom form fields

Think of it this way. If you can ask it in Google Forms or Survey Monkey, you can ask it in Compyle!

Organizations can send and collect forms via email, direct links, individual records, or multi-entry forms. To cut down on the workload for case workers, Compyle users may choose to schedule regular email reminders for Participants to complete assigned surveys. This allows them to ensure survey completion within a chosen timeframe. 

Once forms are submitted, organizations can immediately view results in various ways. In short, users can view form results in the disaggregate (view responses per participant) or in the aggregate (view compiled survey results for specified groups ). Why use Compyle over another survey system? Compyle provides analytics over time for participants and Groups. Most surveying and data collection tools don’t provide these analytics.

Functionality #3b: Get More Detailed with Custom Data Fields

Every organization is unique and needs access to specific data about the people they work with. That’s why we designed Compyle’s data collection and tracking features to be highly customizable. When creating new Participants, organizations can customize the language they use and collect virtually any piece of data they want with “Custom Fields.”

What is a Custom Field? Imagine you wanted to collect data about your program participants’ smoking habits and wanted to know how often they smoked based on preset categories (often, seldom,  rarely, never). But when you went into your case management system, there was no option to track this data (either manually or via surveys) and associate it with an individual. That would severely limit your ability to analyze participants and create targeted strategies if you cared about reducing smoking. 

With Custom Fields, however, you would be able to create a space (“field”) for this data parameter, associate it with individuals, collect that data manually or via forms, and create groups based on responses (often, seldom, rarely, never). Sounds much more helpful for a program designed to reduce smoking, doesn’t it?

Custom Fields allow organizations to transcend the barriers associated with more rigid data collection systems that offer limited demographic tracking capabilities. With customization, Compyle users can aggregate and disaggregate participant demographic data based on the most critical information.

Functionality #4: Improve Your Systems and Services With Analytics 

Once individuals complete forms, organizations can utilize Compyle’s data analytics functionality to identify patterns, make better decisions, and improve their services. Compyle presents analytics via “Compylations.” Compylations present chosen data in various ways. Users can choose from bar or line graphs and break down data based on demographic information or Custom Field responses. 

Compylations are where Custom Fields shine. Being proactive and creating useful Custom Fields allows users to get more specific about how they analyze their data. Disaggregating data is necessary for any organization looking to make a tangible, measurable difference in their organization or community. That’s why Compyle makes disaggregating data by race, gender, income, and any other characteristic easy.

Again, Compyle allows users to look at trends over-time to quickly see if they are making improvements and correct course when necessary.

For further analysis and strategizing, Compyle offers automatic data transfers into Clear Impact Scorecard (our performance and impact reporting system). Compyle and Scorecard compatibility means organizations can “set it and forget it,” immediately transferring outcome-related data into Scorecard as it becomes available. 

Confused about the difference between Compyle and Scorecard? Check out this article.

Final Thoughts

Compyle makes tracking people, organizations, and program outcome data simple. Compyle’s custom form creation, survey distribution, email scheduling, analytics, and data transfer functionalities significantly reduce the administrative lift of data collection and management.

Organizations can collect virtually any type of data they want with Compyle, whether for case management, applications, intake forms, surveys, or other data collected via various software platforms or manual processes. 

Compyle use across partnerships and networks allows for improved data quality so that funders can easily access data for shared measures across organizations and ensure grantees submit data consistently.

Unlike our competitors, we price Compyle based on the number of Participant records an organization wants rather than the number of users. This pricing structure means an organization can get its whole team to use Compyle at no extra cost. For more information and a free private demo, visit our Compyle page here. 

Helpful Links:

• Learn more about the differences between Clear Impact Scorecard and Clear Impact Compyle (and how they work together)
• See how Comypyle works in real-time and works together with Clear Impact Scorecard in a private customized demo.
• See what changed in Compyle over the past year since this blog was published (and why it’s important).
• See how Compyle compares to some of our competitors in our vendor comparison.