MERL Tech DC 2018

This session is designed to help M&E teams design monitoring and evaluation platforms for tech interventions, with a particular focus on how to use multiple digital data sources to understand the performance and impact of a platform. Websites and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) lines are now commonly used in development programmes to create awareness, motivate community members, and influence knowledge, attitude and behaviour change. Each channel offers the opportunity for users to actively contribute to engage with the platform and participate in surveys and discussion. This panel will discuss the measurement of two such platforms from Girl Effect, both aimed at mid-adolescent girls. Girls Connect is a phone service that relies on IVR technology to deliver content to girls on demand. Callers can access story episodes, and have the option of being connected to a real-life Role Model to further build on the lessons and advice shared in the story content. Springster is a website with short articles, comments from users and interactive polls and surveys. Both platforms have extensive back end capabilities. The types of data generated and collected by each platform varies widely, from online surveys to Google Analytics to call center data to comment analysis. The interplay between these multiple data sources can be complex - and to fully understand impact, we must carefully utilise multiple data sources. This presentation will show how the measurement framework for each platform ‘makes sense’ of multiple data sources by using a common framework to describe reach, engagement, participation and impact. The presenters will discuss the importance of differentiating the ‘levels’ of the framework in order to better understand pathways to impact. The session will include a participatory activity in which session attendees will have the opportunity to apply the measurement framework to their own projects.