Play #4: ‘If This, then That’ 5-minute Survey
When you are fitting tech into a system with multiple stakeholders, get feedback early on what would be most useful through a quick survey (we use a Google-form), instead of guessing.
The Pilot: The Humanitarian Supply Blockchain
If we introduce blockchain to humanitarian supply chains, we will be able to increase trust and cost-effectiveness, and influence wider uptake of the technology.
Use this play to answer our challenge around fitting into existing systems: when the tech isn’t a fit for existing planning, decision making, execution or implementation systems in the country or domain area
This play is part of our Frontier Technology Playbook: Plays by DfID Pioneers to Overcome Development Challenges. Click here to read the other plays and an introduction to the Playbook.
The Pioneers: Datarella
The humanitarian supply chain saves lives through rapid distribution of goods post-disaster. Building an application to monitor these goods on the blockchain, even for part of the supply chain, is costly and time-consuming.
Before we’d built anything, we created a Google-form with our concept and some key questions: asking “if we did [x], would it increase [y]”. For example: “if we provided a real-time view of goods, would it increase your trust in suppliers?”. Then, after we’d drawn up our basic wireframe (no coding yet), we sent another Google-form asking which features stakeholders found most useful and which they did not.
For time-poor stakeholders, this proved a time-effective way to gather feedback on our concept. Our first survey let us know which outcomes our supply chain was most interested in; our second gave us clarity on which features we should build out. Everyone filled out the survey on their own (no groupthink), so disagreements were clearly surfaced for discussion.
The Practice
- Be specific in your questions. The more specific you are, the easier it is to answer questions and more feedback you’ll have
- One benefit of Google-form is it enables you to embed photos and videos. Make your form visual to get better feedback
- Have clear success metrics for what you expect. For example, we gave ourselves a threshold of 50% or more to agree before implementing a concept
Get in touch…
Drop kira.nezu@datarella.com a line to find out more.
