00:00:00 Introduction

My name is Alex Bertram. I'm the technical director at BeDataDriven. I've got with me Jeric Kison who is our M&E implementation specialist. We are going to talk today about a fairly specific thing regarding one of our template databases, which is one of the many use cases for ActivityInfo.

Before we start, just a bit of housekeeping. We are recording the webinar, so a recording will be available on our website, probably the day after tomorrow. You will get a link to the recording if you are registered. We are using Zoom, which has two different features. It has a chat feature where you can say hello if you'd like, but it also has a Q&A. If you have questions, please put them in that Q&A space, as that makes it easier to answer them at the end of the presentation.

00:00:00 What is ActivityInfo?

I'm going to give just a quick introduction to ActivityInfo for those of you who might not be familiar with it yet. Then, before we get into the template and really look at the software, I want to take a step back and think about what "M&E at Scale" means. Then we'll look at how to use the template, how to customize it for your needs, and how to get started.

So what is ActivityInfo? If you saw our webinar last week, we described it as a relational end-to-end data management system designed for M&E. It covers everything from data collection to visualization in one package. We've spent the last 12 years building the system because we think having everything in one place is really important for making monitoring and evaluation systems successful.

Some of the use cases for ActivityInfo include managing beneficiaries. Whether your program has 100 beneficiaries or 50,000, ActivityInfo is a great tool for that. It is used for case management for training, education, protection, and the full range of surveys, such as doing impact surveys or feedback surveys. Of course, it is also used for humanitarian coordination and partner reporting. ActivityInfo supports some of the largest humanitarian operations in the world, such as the response to the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, as well as the response for Venezuela in South America.

00:00:00 The challenge of M&E at scale

Today we wanted to look at this Global M&E template and this challenge of what I call M&E at Scale. A lot of times ActivityInfo is used for projects. Even if it's a large project, maybe 50,000 or 100,000 beneficiaries, it's managed by one team, and you have one thing to think about. You have one set of indicators and one set of results.

As you start to look at how larger organizations handle this, in some cases, that just means getting a bigger database. For example, if your activities are fairly similar across all the places that you're working, such as supporting health clinics in 25 countries, your operations might look pretty similar. In every country, you might have a set of clinics or health centers with patients and consultations. It is straightforward to simply aggregate those values up the chain.

However, another scenario that we see just as often is that large organizations have not one kind of activity, but many activities that are changing all the time. You might be present in three countries: in one country, you have a water and sanitation project; in another, you're providing shelter at very short notice to internally displaced people; and in a third, you're providing vocational skills to Venezuelan refugees in Ecuador. Across these three projects, each has very different indicators. They might have different donors, each with their own set of reporting requirements. It becomes very challenging to aggregate all of those different indicators across the organization.

If you have everything in ActivityInfo, you might have one database for each project or each country, and you can calculate your indicators automatically. The flow of information works really smoothly when everything is in ActivityInfo, from the field to looking at which services an individual received, all the way up to a global level. But this can be a daunting place to start. If you have a lot of different projects, it's not easy to tell everybody overnight that we are using a new system. It takes time to understand the requirements and train staff.

You might have each project having its own information system. Some projects are using a set of Excel sheets, maybe some project has an Access database, but a third project is drowning in paper. The challenge of moving from this to a unified information system where you have thousands of people on the same page can be pretty challenging.

00:00:00 Using the Global M&E template

What we are going to talk about today is an intermediate step: the Global M&E database. It helps give you a starting point because it creates a space where you can start to at least collect all of these different indicators from different projects rather than trying to do this by email. Having a database where people can connect to a secure web interface and provide figures or totals on a quarterly basis is a really manageable first step. This is something that you can realistically do within the space of a month or two.

Over time, it gives you the space to start to migrate some of those individual projects into this unified information system. You might decide to start where projects are really struggling to manage information and set up an ActivityInfo database for them. Then those indicators can be calculated automatically while the other programs are still entering results through the web interface. You can go step-by-step until someday you reach this ideal state where you have everything in a uniform information system.

Let's look at how to actually use this template. On our website, under the Support section and then Templates, you'll find the Global M&E template. Click on "Try this Template." If you click on "Get Started with this Template" and you don't have an account, it will prompt you to create one. You can give your database a name, perhaps the name of your organization, and then click on "Add Database from Templates."

Essentially, the way that this template is connected is that you have a list of projects. Each of those projects is related to a single country. Each project has its own logical framework, which includes a list of indicators. Then each of the projects has a set of progress reports, in this case monthly, and each of the progress reports includes a report on the progress on each of its indicators.

I have a form here with a list of projects. For example, imagine my organization is involved in the intersection of ecology and humanitarian work, ranging from reforestation projects in Congo to a project that supports the participation of women and young people in peace consolidation. You can see the columns here just like you would have in Excel, such as the budget of the project and the theme.

We have a couple of sub-forms that allow you to add related information to these projects. The first thing I have here is a logical framework form. For example, maybe one of our outcomes is that fishing companies switch to more sustainable species. To track that outcome, I have two indicators: the number of fishermen or women trained in a specific practice and the number of fishing companies that no longer use the practice.

You can always add a new outcome, impact, or indicator. Let's add an indicator: "Number of training sessions to promote the importance of biodiversity." I'll add this as a count indicator. I will leave the strategic framework link blank for now and just enter a baseline and a target for the end of the project.

We also have monthly reports on that framework. I'm going to add a record for this month. For this template, I added a couple of general questions, such as overall project progress to date. I can give it an overall progress rate and say it is on track. One of the most interesting things we want to track is the indicator results. I can add the indicators for this project, see the baseline target, and enter that we reached 50 this month.

ActivityInfo will also track the full history of any of this data provided to the system. If you need to see who changed what or who reported what, you've always got a log of that. You can also see sub-forms for monitoring visits and key documents. For example, if you have staff visiting projects, they can record their notes. You can also use ActivityInfo as a repository for key project documents, such as the grant agreement with the donor.

00:00:00 User management and importing data

Now you can start to invite your project staff to access this database and start filling out these monthly reports. You can do that from Database Settings and then User Management. I will invite Jeric to this database. I can choose that he's either the M&E specialist who is allowed to make changes to the structure or just doing data entry on indicators.

You can also use ActivityInfo's importer to bring in data in bulk. If you are migrating from another system, for example, and want to add all of your projects from the last two years, you can copy from your Excel spreadsheet and click Import to paste that into ActivityInfo. That will help you line up the columns. If you have columns that aren't exactly the same, or if there are data entry mistakes, the importer is going to flag that for you. You can download the errors as a separate sheet, correct them, and import them later. This is also a nice way for field staff to be able to import their indicator results without typing them in one by one.

00:00:00 Analyzing the data

With ActivityInfo's built-in tools, you can create dashboards and reports that show your progress. I can start out with something simple, like a pivot table to look at the number of projects by country. You might also be interested in the total budget by country. You can make this as a chart, for example, a pie chart showing the size of the projects.

I can save this as a dashboard. This becomes a pre-defined report that you can use to track your progress and share with others in your organization. I can also add a map to see where our projects are. This gives you a nice interactive map where you can do some styling, for example, showing types of projects by using icons. You can share these maps with a link and embed them in your website.

One of the things that you might want to do is to look at not just individual project indicators, but roll them up to more general indicators. For example, to calculate our reach as an organization across all of our projects. When defining the indicators for the projects, I made a list of what you might call strategic indicators. I can link a project-level indicator to a more general indicator, such as "Direct Beneficiaries." This means that if I look at all of my indicator reports, I can roll up these indicators by their strategic indicator. I can sum up these values and break them down by country or show the evolution of that indicator over time.

00:00:00 Customizing the database structure

In this last session, I want to take a look at how you can customize this for your own organization. Everything in ActivityInfo can be changed because, in the end, it's just a database.

Let's start by looking at the projects form. In the upper right-hand corner, you'll see a "Form Settings" button. For each of the things that we're tracking about the project, you can make your own changes. For example, you might decide that you want to keep the project field but add some additional categories, like "Water and Sanitation."

You might have other things that you want to record, such as the region or specific risks applicable to the project. Another common thing is the security risk level. You could add another sub-form here if you wanted to track expenditures. You can add fields like categories, amounts, and dates.

If we drill down to any of these sub-forms, for example, for the monitoring visits, you can add questions that are specific to your work. Whatever you're using ActivityInfo for, it's going to be adapted to handle the information that is important to you and to your organization.

00:00:00 Q&A session

Abdul: Most organizations are shifting towards databases or storing data on-premises due to the recent high number of attacks. Do you think that this is the best approach, and how safe is the data on this database?

Alex: With ActivityInfo, you have two choices. You can use our hosted system, where we manage the software for you, or you can use the self-managed version which you can download and run on your own servers. I don't think it's as simple as saying on-premise is more secure than being in the cloud. A lot of the risks are related to the correctness in the configuration or the attention spent on the software. Our team is 100% focused on ActivityInfo and making sure that the data is safe. We host very sensitive data and offer strong confidence regarding security.

If you have a team with the expertise to manage physical security and server updates, we are happy to partner with you for the self-managed version. However, not every organization is equipped to take on those responsibilities. One of the big high-profile data breaches recently was from a large UN organization running SharePoint on-premise that wasn't updated in time.

Abdul: My second question was regarding SharePoint on-premise and data breaches, specifically with the ICRC. I was looking to see what would be the best possible solution for my organization.

Alex: Increasingly, the key to security is making sure that people are taking care of each of the layers. We are very focused on the software, but we don't manage the physical servers ourselves; we use the Google Cloud platform, where teams of security guards manage physical security.

Abdul: I had a question regarding dashboards and reporting. Sometimes we get ad hoc requests from upper management. Would it be possible to show us a very small dashboard of the data that currently exists on this template to see how we can customize our own dashboards?

Alex: I probably should have added more data to this template. What we started to do here gives you a hint of what you can do: combining charts, tables, and maps together in a single view. You can also have multiple dashboards for different audiences. We have more webinars coming up on using these reporting tools.

Zachary: Can an external evaluator use your system to conduct a mid-term evaluation for a project? Secondly, can we go down to other administrative levels, like regions or the country level, on the maps?

Alex: ActivityInfo can be a great tool for mid-term evaluations, especially if you are data-heavy. You can set up a combination of surveys or secondary data sources quickly. Regarding geography, you can create whatever levels you need. If you have shapefiles for the city or block level, you can upload those to ActivityInfo. We also have a built-in geo-database that you can use as a reference layer. For most countries, we have detailed geographic layers.

David: Once you start the database, how can we get it? Is it downloadable from the Google Play Store to get started?

Alex: You can find our mobile data collection app in the Play Store for Android. For iOS, you can visit activityinfo.org and log in. There are guides in our Documentation section on using the mobile app. If you are looking at mobile data collection, you might also look at some of our other templates like the IDP site assessment or household survey. We also have a self-paced training course available.

Aditi (via chat): How can we use the mapping with control and target groups?

Alex: I'm going to punt on that one because we have a webinar coming up in March on measuring impact quantitatively, where we will cover using survey data and control/target groups for understanding impact in depth.

Aditi (via Q&A): Is this accessible to everyone? My current interface does not look like this.

Alex: I have the "Add Database" button because I started an evaluation account as an account owner. You may have been invited to access somebody else's database. If you'd like to experiment with the Global M&E template, you can go to our website under Support and Templates, and click "Get Started With This Template." If you are not logged in, it will prompt you to create an account or an evaluation account, which will allow you to add that database.

Thank you for your questions. Our next webinar is on February 17th, where we will be talking about the ActivityInfo mobile data collection app. Have a great week.