Community organizations do a great deal of work and document little of it, because documenting competes with the work itself. Evidence Core takes the photos, voice notes, emails and texts your staff already have, drafts the record for them, and asks a person only to confirm it.
What it does
Staff capture, the system structures, a person confirms, and reports come only from what was confirmed.
Capture from the tools already in hand
Staff send a photo, a short voice note, a forwarded email or a text from their phone, or upload a PDF or a spreadsheet. Capturing an event takes under two minutes.
Sending by email or text needs no login. Each sender is verified once, and messages from anyone else are held back without a reply.
AI drafts, a person decides
The system reads each message in Chinese or English and proposes metrics, quotes and stories, linked to the right activity. Nothing counts as a record until a supervisor confirms, edits or discards it, which takes about a minute.
If a document contains instructions, they are kept as part of the evidence and never followed.
Reports drawn from confirmed evidence
An administrator picks a format and a period, and Evidence Core drafts a newsletter, flyer, monthly or annual report, grant application or event report from the confirmed evidence that audience may see.
The draft lists the gaps it could not fill with evidence, so the writer knows what to add rather than what to invent.
Chinese and English on equal footing
Programs, people, stories and reports work in both languages without a translation add-on. When the same person appears under a Chinese name and an English name, the records are matched, and only a staff member can merge them.
A first year that starts with your history
Past annual reports, yearbooks and newsletter archives can be mined into draft evidence, so you begin with what you have already done instead of an empty database.
Outcomes tied to what you already count
From your mission and goals, Evidence Core proposes a ladder of outcomes, from outputs through to impact, with indicators tied to metrics you already collect. As evidence is confirmed, the figures on the outcome board update on their own.
How consent and provenance work
Consent is enforced by the system, not left to an editor’s memory.
Every item carries one of three scopes: internal, for staff only; funder reports; or public. Only an administrator can widen an item’s scope. Photos with faces start as internal, and location data is removed from photos when they arrive.
Scope is checked at the two places every piece of evidence has to pass. When someone opens a photo or file, it is served through a link that expires after 15 minutes. When a report looks for evidence, it sees only the scopes its audience allows, so a public newsletter can only ever use public items.
Every number in a report traces back to the item it came from, the person who confirmed it, and the original message, photo or page. If consent is withdrawn, every report that used the item is flagged for review.
A program can also be set to record counts only, so that no individual is ever linked to it.
| Report | Audience | Draws on |
|---|---|---|
| Newsletter, flyer, promotion | Public | Public items only |
| Monthly or annual report, grant application | Funders | Public and funder-cleared items |
| Event report, internal review | Staff | Everything confirmed |
How it connects to the other products
Newsletters and reports are drafted inside Evidence Core itself, from the same store of evidence and under the same consent rules, so there is nothing to copy between systems.
CS People, which is planned, will connect your members to Evidence Core as the people behind the work.
How it is delivered and what you own
A service we run, with your organization’s data kept apart and yours to take with you.
Hosted at cyphia.app
Evidence Core runs as a service we operate at cyphia.app. Each organization’s data is kept apart at the database level, administrators sign in with two-factor authentication, and media is stored privately.
Your data, whenever you want it
An administrator can export the entire organization, every record and every media file, in open formats. Nothing keeps you on the service except its usefulness.
Backed up and on record
Backups run every night, and restoring one is rehearsed every month. Every confirmation, scope change, export and merge is written to an audit log.
Starting with a pilot
A pilot needs one organization, one program lead with a phone, and one supervisor with ten minutes a week. If capturing takes longer than two minutes or confirming takes longer than one, we stop and fix that first.
Read the whitepaper
The executive whitepaper covers the problem, the design, consent and security, and how Evidence Core compares with other tools, in about eight minutes.
Read the Evidence Core whitepaper Read the whitepaper in Chinese Download the whitepaper as a PDF
Start with one program
Tell us where the proof of your work gets lost today, and we’ll tell you whether Evidence Core fits.