00:00:00 Introduction

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the webinar on 4W best practices. We'll get started in just a few seconds. Today we're going to look at best practices for 4W, or "Who does What, Where, and When." But I think these practices are really applicable in any situation where you're collecting data from multiple partners that might be in the cluster system, that might be within your own organization. If you have different country programs that you're collecting data from, any time that you have multiple organizations or units providing data to a single system.

Just to introduce myself, my name is Alex Bertram. I'm the Technical Director here at BeDataDriven. I got started in my career with partner reporting in many ways. I worked with IOM and OCHA in Afghanistan about 15 years ago, and then with UNICEF in the DRC and Bukavu, where I worked supporting the NFI/Shelter Cluster as an IM. Since 2010, I've been here at BeDataDriven, where I've had a chance to work with organizations from the Middle East, Africa, and now in the response in Venezuela and everything in between. I hope what I'm going to share today will be useful. It's distilled from our experience working with deployments across the world with many different types of organizations.

00:04:17 The four stages of deployment

When you're deploying the system, or any system really, you can think of it as four different stages. In the first stage, you're building consensus among stakeholders, getting everybody on board with the idea of a new system. Once you have buy-in from everybody, then you actually set up the forms and the permissions for the system to collect the data. Once that's finished, you can launch with partners and get everybody on board, ready to participate in the system. Finally, there's actually doing something with the data that you've collected: analyzing and publishing. So we'll look at each of these four stages and some best practices that apply at each step.

00:05:08 Building consensus among key stakeholders

If you're in the beginning of a reporting cycle, or maybe you have an existing program where you're collecting data with Excel spreadsheets or via email, the first thing is to build a consensus among your stakeholders that there's a need for a change. You have to look at your situation and see what your relationship looks like to the reporting partners. In many cases, when you're working in the cluster system, you're really working on coordination among equals. So it's not like you can just go out and tell everybody, "This is what we're going to do." Often, you really need to build a consensus to convince people that this is worth doing and worth the investment.

The first best practice when building consensus is to really look at the advantages of a unified system. No matter what, we work very hard to make ActivityInfo easy to use, but any new system comes with a cost. It takes time for people to be aware of the system and to provide data. It's very important that people see the reason and the benefits to the organization or the country as a whole. The things that we hear from our users are often about quality—that having a unified system provides data that you can rely on and make good decisions on. It reduces delays, allowing you to give a new snapshot of the response each month. It allows you to adapt to a crisis more quickly and provide data needed for funding decisions or gap analysis based on real evidence. Finally, it saves time compared to managing Excel spreadsheets via email.

The second best practice is that when you do have a hierarchy, such as in a consortium or within the same organization, include the idea of an information system from day one. Include it in grant agreements. When you work to co-create a program with your implementing partners, make it very clear from the beginning that you are planning on and expecting monthly or quarterly information. Include that in the grant agreement so that they can plan for the human resources required. If you come six months later after a program has started and say, "By the way, we're also going to need you to report monthly," there's going to be a lot more resistance.

00:10:53 Setting up forms and permissions

Once it seems that you've got some consensus among key stakeholders, it comes time to actually set up the forms and the permissions that are going to be part of the system. Thankfully, with ActivityInfo, this process can go quite quickly, and we have a lot of resources to help you get started.

00:11:44 Best practice: Pre-load reference data

Best practice number three is to pre-load reference data. This can be about locations, program types, or whatever data is important across your program or sectors. It is very helpful to load this in to begin with so that people don't have to type it in themselves; they can select it from a menu.

When you start your partner reporting system in ActivityInfo, we have a template that includes permissions for multi-partner reporting. If you go to database settings, you'll find that this template includes a reference data folder. You can add partners here, or any other reference data that is important. For example, if you're collecting information about donors throughout all of your sectors, it helps to add a form here so that you can store and update that list.

Geographic data is also very important reference data. We have a predefined geographic database for most countries with detailed administrative levels like provinces and districts. However, some data, like camps, villages, or schools, is useful to add manually because it is often the kind of thing you want to manage yourself. You can create a form for schools and link it to the district where it is found. You can add that data manually or use the importer to import a full list from an existing Excel sheet. When you add your data collection forms, you can simply reference those forms so that you have consistent data across all of your activities.

00:17:57 Best practice: Using subforms

Subforms are another powerful feature in ActivityInfo. A common instruction might be to have a form with a partner and a project, and then for each project, you expect a report each month. If you have projects with many locations, it can get annoying to have to keep repeating the partner name and location details.

You can actually add many levels of subforms. For example, first you have a partner, then a location, and then the month. This way, if you need details by district or province, the partners don't have to repeat the details for the project and the location each month. In the form settings, you can have data about the project itself (project code, partner, donor) at the top level. Then, you can have a subform for each of the districts, and within each district, you can have monthly reports.

This means that your partner would really only have to enter data about the project once. Then, they can drill down and see the list of districts where they are working. When they report each month, they can navigate to the right project and district to provide the monthly data without repeating the static information.

00:23:48 Best practice: Minimize forms using relevance rules

Try to minimize the number of forms using relevance rules. If you have 120 forms in your list, that's quite a lot of work for a partner to navigate. Instead, think about using a fewer number of forms but using relevance rules to show only the indicators that apply to the specific partner or activity.

For example, if you have three activities—distributing textbooks, classroom rehabilitation, and teacher training—you could create three different data collection forms. However, it is better to have one form for "Education Intervention" and ask the partner to choose which activities they're undertaking. You can then use relevance rules to say, "Only require this indicator if the type of intervention is distribution of textbooks."

This way, if a partner is doing all three activities, they still only have one form to fill out. If they are only doing one, they will only see the indicator relevant to their intervention. You can also put this activity question at the partner form level. If you know Partner ABC is doing WASH activities, you can set the form to only display WASH indicators for them. This ensures that the right data is collected and allows you to make specific fields required.

00:30:05 Organizing forms for data collection vs. analysis

Sometimes when you're planning a program or doing analysis, you're thinking about sectors or strategic objectives. However, that's not always relevant at the data collection stage. You want to organize your data collection around how the data is collected or provided.

Think about who is providing this data. If the same partner is providing data on all of the sectors, it might make sense to have a single form for that partner. If you have some partners who are doing only WASH and others only NFI, then it makes sense to have different forms. You also want to think about reporting frequency and geographic level. If some data is collected monthly and others weekly, or if some is at the district level and others at the national level, those should be split into separate forms.

00:33:17 Best practice: Key fields and importing

Using good key fields can make importing easier. If you mark fields like "Partner" and "District" as key fields, it ensures you have one result per partner and per district. This means you can use the importer to update the data rather than just adding new records.

For example, if the next month comes around and you want to update the beneficiary numbers for existing records, the importer can match these records by the key fields (partner name and district). Existing records will be updated with the latest values. This ability to update via import is very handy if partners are reporting on a large volume of data and have their own database.

00:36:00 Best practice: Importing fields

This is useful especially in the beginning when you're bringing in indicators. Some deployments might have hundreds of indicators. If you have a document or a response plan with a list of indicators, you can use the field import tool. You can simply copy the list from a spreadsheet and paste it into the "Add field" tool in ActivityInfo to import all fields directly. This helps you get started much quicker.

00:38:22 Best practice: Permissions and roles

One of ActivityInfo's main benefits is that you can restrict users based on their organization or their partner. When adding users, you can assign them roles that ensure they only see records belonging to their partner. You can also give access to specific sectors or forms.

It is a best practice to really think through the roles and permissions you are giving. The default "Administrator" role has permission to do nearly everything. Even for a country director or boss, you should consider if they actually need these permissions, as anyone can make a mistake. You can duplicate a role and customize it—for example, creating an "HQ role" that can view all records but cannot add or edit them.

For reporting partners, you have a choice. You could choose to give access to all partners' records for coordination purposes, or restrict it. You might also want to remove the "Delete" permission to prevent accidental data loss. Giving people only the permissions they need reduces the chance for error.

00:42:37 Launching with partners

Once the database is set up, there is a lot you can do to make your deployment successful that goes beyond the software. The first thing is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Share instructions, but also explain why you are doing this and connect the information system to results for beneficiaries.

You can put together a reporting guide, which can be a simple PDF telling partners exactly what kind of information you need. While we have a general training manual, providing how-to guides for your specific program is very helpful. With COVID, many trainings are now done online via webinars, which are easier and cheaper to provide regularly.

You can also create information products like training videos. For example, the Iraq Education Cluster provides a training video on YouTube in Arabic. In Turkey, they created a Power BI dashboard showing each sector's indicators and guidance on how to collect the data. These are great ways to keep partners involved and help them use the system.

00:47:00 Setting a reporting schedule

Set a reporting schedule and clearly communicate that. For example, in the Syrian response in Lebanon, reporting for the next month opens on the 2nd, data entry is expected by the 7th, and after feedback and checks, data is published by the 12th. This gives a clear rhythm for entering data and providing results.

ActivityInfo has a "Lock" feature that makes managing this easier. You can add a time-based lock at the database, folder, or form level. For example, you can lock data for October so that no existing data can be changed and no new data can be added for that period. This helps enforce reporting frequency and ensures that numbers don't change after you've published them in a sitrep.

00:50:00 Analyzing and publishing results

Once the data comes in, it's time to do something with it. This is where the real value of the system comes from. You need to show stakeholders that you can do something useful with the data.

In ActivityInfo, you can do a lot of built-in reporting, such as creating maps, pivot tables, and charts. As an Information Management Officer, you can help your partners by setting up key reports for them, like a summary table of partner totals by province. You can save this report and share it with others in your database so they have immediate access to it. You can also create thematic maps, such as a map of beneficiaries by district, and share those as well.

00:54:10 Best practice: Publishing dashboards

Finally, publish dashboards and information products to create a positive feedback loop. You've gotten everyone to participate, so now is the time to give them something in return. Many country-level deployments use Power BI to build interactive public dashboards. These allow users to drill down by camp, district, or governorate.

This gives value back to the people who provided the data. They can see their own efforts reflected, and they can share this with their donors and stakeholders. It also provides a platform for local and national NGOs to highlight their work alongside INGOs.

It is easy to integrate ActivityInfo with these tools. You can export data via the API using the "Query JSON" feature. You get a URL that you can paste into Power BI, allowing you to create live dashboards that update automatically as data comes into ActivityInfo.

00:58:00 Conclusion

That brings me to the end of my presentation. Those were my 12 best practices coming from our users deploying this across the world. We'll share a detailed list along with links after the webinar. If you want more guidance, we have beginner courses coming up in November and December. Please don't hesitate to get in touch with me via our website or email if you have any questions. Thanks for joining us.