Vital Voices was founded on a simple idea: nations and communities cannot move forward without women in leadership positions. Today, the organization invests in over 49,000 change-makers across 195 countries and territories—leaders tackling extreme violence, economic inequity, and climate change. Their work touches 3 million lives every year.

To understand the impact of their programs, Vital Voices collects massive volumes of unstructured, essay-style responses from women leaders in focus groups and surveys. For Technical Project Manager Carol Lopez Lima, making sense of that data is central to the organization’s ability to secure funding—and to prove that the investment in women’s leadership actually works.

But the analysis process was broken. Program coordinators were spending weeks color-coding spreadsheets, and the results were inconsistent. Different analysts running the same data would arrive at different conclusions. There was no single source of truth, and no efficient way to translate thousands of raw voices into evidence that donors could act on.

“We didn’t have anything similar to Dovetail,” says Carol. “It was just manual analysis.”

Vital Voices implemented Dovetail as their intelligence layer—a centralized system that handles the heavy lifting of analysis so program teams can stay focused on supporting women around the world.

By connecting survey data from tools like Alchemer directly into Dovetail, the team eliminated the manual bottleneck entirely. Instead of program managers spending weeks processing open-ended responses, Dovetail centralizes feedback from 195 countries and territories and surfaces themes instantly. Whether someone is a data engineer or a program coordinator with no technical background, every Vital Voices team member now works from the same source of truth when reporting back to funders.

The shift wasn’t just operational—it was cultural. Standardizing analysis meant the stories of women leaders were being captured consistently across the entire organization, removing the noise that had made previous reporting unreliable.

“Storytelling is a main goal for the organization as we engage different donors and drive funding,” Carol adds. “We need information that we can use in reports.”

The real turning point came when Carol’s team started using Dovetail’s AI capabilities to analyze complex sets of open-ended survey responses. By feeding specific prompts into the platform, she could generate a structured report in a fraction of the time it previously took—reports that directly informed funding cycles.

For the Global Fellowship program alone, Vital Voices analyzed hundreds of hours of qualitative interviews, rapidly synthesizing themes across diverse leadership styles and sectors. AI Agents helped run targeted prompts and summarize complex responses into structured evidence for funder reports—directly supporting the mission to protect leaders in crisis.

“I used Chat for the open-ended questions, and it worked really well,” Carol says. “When you have a lot of data in Dovetail, it’s the most useful tool for getting to the answer quickly.”

The Tech and Data Team—not just researchers—can now perform qualitative analysis independently. That capability is expanding: plans are in place to onboard all program staff this year, putting donor-ready insights in the hands of the people closest to the mission.

The results speak for themselves. Reports that previously took weeks are now generated in days—five times faster. Vital Voices has already produced 10 funder reports and completed 3 focus group analyses using Dovetail-backed evidence. That speed matters when a global network of 49,000 change-makers is waiting on the resources their programs need to survive.

As Vital Voices continues its digital transformation, the goal is to expand Dovetail access to all Program Managers. Leaders running seven-week intensives and two-year fellowship programs will be able to own their own data, produce reports in real-time, and surface the impact of their work without waiting on a central team to process it.

By building this intelligence layer, Vital Voices ensures that every voice captured—across 195 countries and territories, in dozens of languages—is counted, understood, and turned into evidence that moves funding forward. With the help of Dovetail, the 49,000 women they serve never have to wonder whether their stories are being heard.