Leveraging Technology for Impact Data Collection

Technology has seeped into our everyday lives and has become ubiquitous. In the development sector, an appreciation of new technologies has emerged as new solutions promise to boost insights and efficiencies.

Data collection, in particular, has seen an increase in the use of technologies in the sector since the COVID-19 pandemic, as replacing traditional methods of collecting data became critical to gather data while keeping communities safe.

With this shift, organizations are beginning to realize the role technology could play in the future. A great deal of learning has occurred during 2020 as we explore, out of necessity, new ways of doing things.

Not everything new is an improvement. And with all things new, tweaking methodologies and practices is required as challenges emerge. If the pandemic has proven anything, it is that organizations and entire societies can do things differently when forced to.

More importantly, organizations are beginning to understand the benefits that leveraging new technologies can bring opportunities that had been previously ill-explored.

Our research has found that mobile app-based data collection among an organization’s beneficiaries brings the following key advantages:

• When longitudinal data collection is made more feasible and affordable, impact insights expand significantly. For organizations for whom long-term impact is key, long-term impact measurement is similarly key. The deployment of remote, mobile-centric data collection has helped a number of organizations identify important insights that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.
• Technology expands reach by shrinking distances. The ability to broadcast impact questionnaires to households and have responses returned digitally, and the ability to distribute digital incentives using the same mechanism, can substantially broaden the reach of an organization’s data capture.
• Self-completed quantitative data is high-quality data. When respondents are afforded the time to complete a survey in the comfort of their own homes, at a time that is convenient to them, and with an appropriate incentive, the data quality challenges expected in a self-completion environment are statistically insignificant. Survey design is critical for maximizing the quality of self-completed data, but the same can also be said in any reporting methodology.

Well-designed quantitative impact data collection and analysis campaigns are not only possible in the COVID-era — the forced reliance on remote data collection has broadened the horizon of data collection opportunities for the future.

Website | LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium | Telegram | OpenSea | YouTube