00:00:00 Introduction

Thanks so much, Fay. I am really excited to share this webinar on notebooks. It is one of the many things in the data visualization and analysis space that we have been working on this year, so I hope it will inspire you to take advantage of it. My colleague Shagoon is also online; he is the developer who worked on most of the notebook features, so feel free to send him feature requests or ideas in the chat.

I want to take just a minute to compare notebooks to dashboards and look at some basic concepts around how we organize reports and analysis in ActivityInfo. Then, we will dive into some examples of using notebooks in ActivityInfo, and I expect to have plenty of time left over for questions at the end.

00:01:30 Reports and analysis concepts

We have been expanding our tools for creating and doing data analysis in ActivityInfo. A report in ActivityInfo has a layout, data sources, and analyses. For example, we started with just one layout of reports where every report had a single analysis, whether that was a map or a table. Now, with the notebook layout, you still have the same report, but you can change the layout so that it is in the form of a notebook.

In a notebook, you can have multiple analyses together with components like headers and explanatory text. Having this extra layout means you can combine multiple analyses—such as a chart, a pivot table, or a map—into a single report. You can always include multiple forms, databases, or as much data from ActivityInfo as you want into a single report. The report is the place in ActivityInfo where you can combine data from many different sources.

00:03:00 Notebooks vs. dashboards

What is the difference between a notebook and a dashboard? When should you use which one? The word dashboard comes from the dash of your car. It is an indicator panel intended to help managers take the right action. If I look at the RPM, I know that if it goes above two or three thousand, I need to change gears. If the check engine light comes on, I need to stop the car. A dashboard is designed to tell you which action needs to be taken and when.

Dashboards are intended for expert audiences—people working with the data every day. Just like a driver is trained to use a car, program managers and field staff know exactly what a dashboard element means. However, if your audience is not an expert, or if you are communicating to outside audiences, a dashboard might be confusing.

Notebooks provide the space to give context. If you are presenting data to a new audience, it is important to help them understand where the data comes from, the quality of the data, and what they are looking at. If you are doing analysis, you likely need to take your audience through several steps to explain your conclusions. A notebook allows you to add text to describe your analysis, give explanation, and defend your findings.

00:06:30 Practical example: 3W activities

I am going to walk through the software on a couple of different exercises. I will start with a guide on using notebooks for 3W activities (Who does What Where). We will use a template based on activities in Myanmar.

The first step of data analysis is to understand the data you have. In this table, we have the organization, the sector, the location, whether the activity is COVID-related, the project title, and the start date. You can switch to the map view to get an overview of the data.

In this example, I want to do an analysis of the impact that COVID-19 has had on these activities. You start by clicking on the "Analyze" button and creating a notebook. On the left-hand side, we have a list of components. Components include analyses like charts and maps, but also headers. I will start by adding a heading and some text to explain the goal of the analysis and provide context for the data source.

00:08:30 Creating pivot tables and charts

The first thing I will do is dig into this data with a pivot table. A pivot table is a great way to aggregate information. I will look at the "COVID related" field and add the project start date to see how the data changes over time. Notebooks are also a good way to clean your data and identify problems; for example, if we see COVID-related activities dated back to 2011, we know there is an issue or that the project is still ongoing.

I will filter the data to show only projects currently under implementation. This will be my first table. I can add a title to this analysis, such as "Summary of ongoing COVID-19 related projects."

The next question might be whether this is related to the sector. We can add another pivot table with the sector in the rows and a calculated field to find the percentage of projects that are COVID-related. We can change the visualization type from a table to a bar chart. This might show considerable differences between sectors, which you can then explain in the text sections of the notebook.

00:14:00 Adding interactive maps

Let's add one more analysis to this notebook to see how it looks when I add an interactive map. I will add a calculated field to see where the COVID-related activities have been added. We can use icons, such as a virus icon, to represent these projects. We can also include non-COVID related projects to see if there is a geographic difference. This might uncover geographic gaps in COVID-specific projects.

Once we have saved the report, we can publish it to make it available to anyone with the link. This only publishes the data that you see in the report; it does not make public the names of the organizations or specific sensitive data unless you choose to include it.

00:17:45 Practical example: IDP response

In my next example, I am going to turn to the IDP response template. This database is a nice example because it has both needs assessments and information about responses to those assessments. We have data on IDP sites, follow-up distributions, voucher fairs, and post-fair evaluations.

Notebooks are a good tool for doing quarterly updates. Let's look at how you can use notebooks to create a donor report to report on some of our key indicators. I will start with the IDP assessment form to look at output indicators. I will create a new notebook and add a summary table with indicators such as the number of assessments conducted and the number of distributions completed.

We can use formulas to ensure we only count completed distributions. We can also break this down by time, dragging the date field onto the columns and rolling it up to the quarter. This allows us to see results on a quarterly basis.

00:22:30 Combining data from multiple forms

We have indicators coming from the distribution form, but we might have other indicators related to the voucher fairs. On the left-hand side, you can see all of the forms included in this analysis. I can select "Forms" and check the "Voucher Fair" form to include it in this report as well. Now I can access this data and count the number of voucher fairs.

The last indicator I might want to add is an outcome indicator from our post-fair evaluation. I want to know how many recipients used their distribution for revenue-generating activities. I can use a formula to turn that into a percentage and add it to my table. Now I have all of my indicators in one table for my quarterly update.

If you add another analysis, such as a map, the data sources you selected for your report remain available. You can create a map showing assessments, distributions, and voucher fairs using different icons and colors to distinguish the activities.

00:27:00 Conclusion and Q&A

Just a couple of other notes: we are still working on exports. We are planning PDF, Word document, and PowerPoint exports for these notebooks. In the meantime, you can always right-click and print. These notebooks are designed to be shared via a link so that donors or partners can view them and navigate down into the analysis to see specific details.

Thank you so much for joining us. We have a number of webinars scheduled coming up on general M&E topics and data visualization. If you are interested in getting started with ActivityInfo, take a look at our self-paced course online. It is free of charge and will take you from A to Z on how to use ActivityInfo.