Anyone who has run a field survey knows the questionnaire is the easy part. The real work lies in finding enough enumerators, coordinating them across locations, chasing updates over WhatsApp, and merging spreadsheets before analysis can begin.
Milsat Technologies has launched the Enum Business Portal to tackle that burden. The research platform combines survey design, fieldwork coordination and data management in a single workspace, and gives users access to Milsat’s trained field agents when they need extra hands.
Sign up for the Enum Business Portal today →
One Workspace for Every Part of a Survey
Every survey project rests on three elements: the questionnaire, the people who carry it into the field, and the responses that come back. The portal handles all three.
Users can build a questionnaire and manage the project in the same place where the work happens. They can assign who collects data, where and when, so supervision no longer depends on scattered messages. Responses stay attached to the project they belong to, which means less time merging files and more time on analysis.
Flexible Staffing for Different Projects
Projects rarely share the same staffing needs, so the portal offers three approaches.
Organisations with their own enumerators can create surveys, coordinate their people and manage data themselves. Those without field staff, or with studies that need more people than they have, can draw on Milsat’s trained agents. The two options can also be combined. A research agency with a strong team in Lagos, for instance, could bring in Milsat’s agents for a study in Kano while keeping everything in one project record. The choice is made per project and can change for the next one.
Who the Portal Is Built For
Milsat designed the portal for organisations that collect data as part of their core work. These include market research agencies running consumer surveys across several locations, consulting and development research teams working on client projects, and media and business intelligence organisations gathering original data for reporting. Research institutions managing large or repeated studies and commodity and price intelligence teams running regular market surveys also fall within its target users.
A Permanent Home for Recurring Research
Weekly price checks, monthly sentiment surveys and repeat research rounds share a hidden cost: each round tends to start from scratch. The survey gets rebuilt, the team is re-briefed, and the files are reorganised.
The portal addresses this by giving recurring research a permanent home. Every new round begins from the structure of the last, so teams spend less time on setup and more on using results.
Four Decisions to Make Before Your First Project
Even with the portal managing the project, data quality still depends on choices made at the start.
- Define the decision. Write down what decision the data will support. Every survey question should serve it, and any that do not should be cut.
- Settle your coverage. List the locations and the number of respondents needed in each. This shows how many enumerators are required and how long fieldwork will take.
- Plan your field capacity. Check whether your team can cover the locations in time. If not, bring in field agents before the study starts, because adding people mid-project is harder to supervise.
- Design for repetition. If the study will run again, keep the questionnaire and procedures consistent from the first round. Comparable rounds are where recurring research earns its value.
Why Milsat Built It
“Over the years, we’ve seen how much good research is held back not by the
questions organisations ask, but by the effort it takes to get answers from the field.
We built the Enum Business Portal so that any organisation, whether it has a
field team or not, can run reliable research without the coordination headaches.”
Taslim Salaudeen, Milsat Technologies
Getting Started
Whether running a one-off study, regular market surveys or a multi-region research programme, users can adapt the portal to how they work. They can use their own team, draw on Milsat’s agents, or combine both. Interested organisations can sign up on the Enum Business Portal.
