00:00:04 Introduction and team presentation

Thank you, Fay. Hello colleagues, hello friends. I see very many familiar names in the chat, so welcome to everyone. Just to add a little bit to the introduction, on the team that you can see hopefully at the top of your screens, I'm currently based in Nairobi, but I'm working for UNICEF Sudan. I must say that this webinar is slightly overdue because we were planning it a long time ago, and then after that, we moved to all different places. With this, I would like to ask the team to present themselves before we really dive into the experience that we would like to share with you today.

Hello, everybody. As mentioned earlier, I'm Diana and working currently in Social and Behaviour Change communication. During the period of 2022-2023, I was working with the team here on refugee response for UNICEF Romania. Currently, as many of my colleagues, I am now moving to another chapter in my life. Passing over to Marius.

Hello everyone. So, I'm Marius. I no longer work for UNICEF Romania. I work for different agencies at this moment, but I served as Information Management Officer between the end of 2022 and the end of 2023.

Hi everyone, and nice to see you all, especially colleagues that are supporting us today. I am the Planning and Monitoring Officer and I took over from a lot of things and products that Tetyana and Marius developed, and it's a great pleasure to carry on that legacy.

There is another team member who was with us during all this time and who was strongly supporting us in the development of everything that we are going to present today. Her name is Sanja Dimitrijevic; she was our Reporting Officer. But she lent us a very useful and very practical lens as a user of all the tools and the experiences that we are going to share today, and also her feedback was very useful. Unfortunately, she couldn't join us today, but she is with us in spirit today.

00:03:05 Context and background

So, what exactly are we going to discuss today? It's very straightforward, very simple. We would like to take you a little bit through the context of where we operated while developing the tools and the solutions that we are going to present. We'll explain what kind of challenges specifically we faced, how did we manage to solve those problems, and the most interesting part from my perspective is what exactly we have learned and what might be useful for anyone going forward and trying to find specific solutions to specific problems that you might be facing in your day-to-day activities.

In this webinar, we want to look at the things from the perspective of program management. So you will not hear and see much of the technical solutions provided by the ActivityInfo platform, but you will hear more about the specific program management type of problems and challenges that we have faced in supporting our Country Office to deliver the commitments for children in Romania. It is about the process of overcoming those challenges and looking for solutions together with the Regional Office team, with the Country Office team, and with our management.

As you see, the title that we have selected for the presentation is "Our journey in UNICEF Romania: with people and for people. How the tech can help us to develop the vital solutions." First of all, an important remark is that what we are presenting today was developed in early 2022, when the war in Ukraine started, and we continued in 2023. When the war in Ukraine started in February 2022, UNICEF Romania was a very small team with a very ambitious Country Programme and a lot of commitments to deliver for children in Romania. It was the last year of the Country Programme, meaning that the results should be already there, and the team was rushing against time to deliver the promises to the children and to the families in Romania and to the government.

Once the war started, there was a massive influx of people coming from Ukraine through the borders with Romania. We are talking about millions of people crossing the border. Between February 2022 and mid-2023, there were about 4 million people who crossed the border in Romania from Ukraine. Some of them stayed, some of them moved on, but all of those people needed help, shelter, food, and support in education and access to health services. These are the tasks that the team in Romania was trying to solve while doing their regular work. Romania was among the first country offices in Europe who responded to the refugee influx coming from Ukraine. The first Blue Dot—a one-stop shop for the needs that refugees faced—was established in Romania. ActivityInfo was rolled out as the information management solution, also one of the first offices, even before all the regional platforms started to support the information management needs across the European region.

00:10:43 With people and for people

We selected the title 'with people and for people' because we could not have done everything that we are going to present today without people. In the first place, these are our partners. These are colleagues from the office who helped us to test different solutions, who helped us to understand what works and what doesn't work. These are our management and our colleagues from the regional office who helped us a lot to understand the requirements and the technical solutions. And 'for people' because all the solutions that we developed were essentially used with one main purpose: to inform our refugee crisis response and to try to serve and meet the needs of the refugees coming from Ukraine and also the host population as best as possible.

00:12:27 Systemic challenges in programme management

Sometimes we, people dealing with the data, try to embrace the unembraceable. Specifically, here we want to share with you several examples linked to one main principle: we wanted to look at the systemic challenges in program management. We had a humanitarian response and the country program expected results that we needed to deliver. We had a lot of things in between, basically the famous Nexus, or building the bridge between the humanitarian response and the development program of the country office.

We are going to talk about five specific problems or challenges that we faced, with the solutions that were enabled by the technology and the tools that ActivityInfo provided us with. These include Humanitarian Performance Monitoring, supply distribution monitoring, field reporting and coordination, funds monitoring (from donor proposals to funds utilization), and support to the country office with social media monitoring and Accountability to Affected Populations.

00:14:57 Challenge 1: Humanitarian reports

The first challenge was getting humanitarian reports timely and accurately. The war started very unexpectedly for the country office in Romania. We had a program that was very upstream, working with the government and ministries to build systems. We did not have many partners on the ground working directly with the beneficiaries. So, when the war started, we had to grow this number of partners literally by days, sometimes by hour. All these partners on the ground helping the refugees needed to be guided to help us understand how they can report better on the funds given by the donors and utilized by UNICEF, so that we keep accountability and know how we can serve the people coming from Ukraine better.

The reporting at initial stages was done with cumbersome Excel spreadsheets. That was very difficult to analyze and make sense of. It was also difficult for the partners because each of them was creating their own spreadsheets. It was a lot of mess, with good intention and fantastic work, but very difficult to put together. Multiple monitoring and reporting channels meant that manual work was prone to mistakes, and data cleaning and analysis were taking an enormous amount of time. We needed to prepare reports every single week, so we were doing nothing but cleaning data, compiling data, and preparing reports.

In 2022, we ended up with 24 implementing partners, and by the beginning of 2023, we already reached 27 partners. Managing and collecting their data using Excel spreadsheets would have been too slow and too difficult. We chose ActivityInfo, which is an easy-to-use online platform with a reputation in emergency situations. We created a form based on the 5Ws used for the partners to report their achievements. We did individual trainings with the partners as soon as the agreements were concluded, and a holistic training at the beginning of 2023.

The result is that by using ActivityInfo and the new form, we were provided with a standardized and secure database, which we then connected with Power BI to create a dashboard. This dynamic visual tool allowed our program colleagues to monitor the partners' performance and make decisions with real-time data analysis. Reports became much easier and much faster for all the different requirements, be it for our internal purposes, for the Regional Offices, or for the interagency.

00:20:37 Challenge 2: Supply distribution

The next challenge was supply distribution. We were faced with a massive influx of people and needed to provide as many supplies as we could. It was like never before in UNICEF Romania; a small office not distributing many supplies to our ongoing programs suddenly had to deliver different types of supplies across the entire Romania. While UNICEF globally has useful tools, by the time they were rolled out, we had to do something very simple and practical so that at any given point, we knew what we ordered, what we distributed, where, to whom, and who else needs our support.

We needed to know exactly how many supplies and where they were distributed quickly for our reporting purposes. Chasing the field colleagues for updates would have been inefficient. We created a simple form in ActivityInfo where the field staff could report the updates. This form was then connected to a very simple dashboard that showed in real time the information by supply types and geographic location of distribution. This new system allowed us to have all the necessary data instantly for our reporting purposes, specifically the weekly SitReps, and improved our reporting process significantly. It also allowed us to understand where else we need to send supplies and who received or did not receive what.

00:23:31 Challenge 3: Field monitoring and coordination

Up to now, it was a typical use of tools like ActivityInfo for quantitative data. Now, we come to something more interesting: field monitoring and coordination. We had seven colleagues based in different parts of Romania whose task was to get in touch with organizations working in those locations, work directly with beneficiaries, and provide the country office with information on what is happening in the field. With the evolution of the response and the beginning of the new country programme in 2023, we needed to find a way to link the refugee response and the interventions planned as part of the country programme.

The challenge was that everything was narrative and qualitative, put mainly in Word documents, with everyone using their own style. It was very difficult to systematize and analyze. We were losing speed, effectiveness, and efficiency in processing information needed for coordination. It was also difficult to trace trends or understand if patterns were happening across different regions. We required something simple, effective, and easy to operate that would not put an additional burden on our colleagues in the field.

We needed weekly updates from our Zone Officers across different regions. Compiling narrative reports in different formats was difficult and time-consuming. We used the ActivityInfo platform to standardize and simplify the reporting process. We trained our Zone Officers, and the form collected key information about programme changes, field developments, or meetings with authorities. This data was fed into a visual dashboard organized by location. This geographical scope allowed us to complement narrative inputs with quantitative information, like demographic data for refugee and host populations, school enrollment, or border entries. We developed this into a weekly informative bulletin, which became a valuable tool for providing a real-time snapshot for coordination and decision-making.

00:32:59 Challenge 4: Funds monitoring

The next challenge was funds monitoring, from proposal to utilization. We started small, but at some point, we had multiple donor proposals floating around the office at different stages to different donors and sectors. There were many colleagues involved in the development because we needed funds urgently. It was difficult to trace them. We decided to unify the fundraising in the office to track proposals better and understand how they contribute to closing funding gaps. The tool evolved to cover not only the emergency response but also the broader perspective of fundraising in the office.

The challenge in developing the monitoring structure was different sources of information. Some came from UNICEF systems like VISION and Insight, but some were done manually, like tracking submitted proposals and how they link to country programme results. We attempted to create a dashboard building on the functionality of ActivityInfo but using multiple sources available within the country so that the process is as automated as possible.

Our solution was to transition from the Excel spreadsheets where we were keeping our donor proposal progress to ActivityInfo. We moved all our data there, making it easier and more stable to update. The next step was to integrate the database from ActivityInfo into a Power BI dashboard, specifically into the already created financial dashboard sourced from VISION. This allowed us to compile data streams and see how the fundraising was addressing our gaps. Showing this in a visual way improved our financial planning and proposal coordination.

00:37:57 Challenge 5: Social media monitoring and AAP

We had multiple channels of reporting, but one was very specific: looking at social media channels to understand what is happening there, the perceptions, and the feedback on the support provided to refugees. We used the platform to monitor social media channels to inform the interventions we were doing as part of the refugee response. We were able to correct some interventions based on the ability to collect and analyze feedback scattered across multiple channels.

Usually, we use other monitoring tools for social media for communication and marketing, but in the context of the Ukraine refugee response, we started using monitoring for getting people's feedback, needs, concerns, and frequently asked questions. We focused on social listening—tracking conversations based on keywords or subjects to inform the programmatic response and detect potential tensions between Ukrainian refugees and the host community. This social listening is crucial for our Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP) strategy.

We faced barriers like language (Ukrainian and Russian) and new channels like Telegram that were not popular in Romania before. We engaged online volunteers through our United Nations Volunteers program to track conversations. Initially, we used Word documents, email reporting, and Google Drive, which led to a huge amount of time for data manipulation. We then tested ActivityInfo for social listening. We created forms based on topics like health, education, protection needs, and financial needs, and we also tracked sentiment.

The results were significant. Our online volunteers were reporting more because it was easier to use on their phones. We started seeing trends, like how events in Ukraine influenced conversations in Romania. We identified persisting issues where questions popped up repeatedly. Most importantly, we saved time, allowing the Social and Behaviour Change team to work more on the findings, creating communication materials and campaigns to address the needs and questions refugees were having. We integrated this with Power BI to create a dashboard where anyone could see details by field of interest.

00:45:51 Summary of approach and lessons learned

To summarize our approach, we tried to streamline everything we had to deal with in the most collaborative way, involving colleagues in the office and the regional office. We focused on complementarity and interconnectedness; finding a solution for one problem often opened opportunities for others. For example, when we needed to organize U-Report volunteers, instead of building a huge Excel table, we used the tool we already had in our hands.

Most importantly, we maintained an end-user focus. We tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the partners reporting to us or the volunteers. We asked what information we would need from the field to process it quickly. The tools might be simple and effective, but we also tried to link information management to the broader aspects of Knowledge Management in the office through dashboards and sharing sessions.

A couple of lessons from our side: Start small but think big. Go from prototype to must-use, which is only possible with regular audits for quality and compliance. Bear in mind the capacities of the colleagues you are working with. Sometimes this requires shifts in the way we think. Systemic challenges require systemic thinking. We tried to have office needs in mind, starting from the emergency response but keeping the broader picture of the UNICEF country programme. Feedback and adaptation with everyone involved is crucial—repeat and adapt if needed. Last but not least, it is always teamwork. It is important to build dialogue and build on the strengths of each team member.

00:53:03 Q&A session

Fay: I really like the first lesson that you mentioned about changing the mindset. It's pretty challenging to do something like that. Could you share two words on how you approach that? What should we keep in mind when we try to do something like this?

Tetyana: The most important thing here is "what's in there for me?" If we are able to find a common language and try to really understand the needs and interests of the people with whom we are working, then the mindset will change. For example, regarding field monitoring, if my option is either to write a lengthy Word document or fill a simple, short online form with specific requirements, it might be easier for me to fill in the form. We really listened to the needs of the colleagues, and with this, it was much easier to engage them.

Diana: It's a challenge, but if we keep the end user in mind, then the quality is going to be there. If they use whatever we create, then at the end of the day, we just want to improve our work and our lives.

Fay: I see a question from Parviz on the reliability of data. Considering the circumstances of the year, was there full understanding and support from the other side?

Tetyana: Reliability is a big question because of the situation. At the very beginning, we did not have any data, so whatever small pieces of information we could get were better than nothing. Then data started to appear, and our colleagues from UNHCR created the Operational Data Portal. There is always a question of triangulation. You keep asking yourself, "Does it make sense? Is it logical?" You find ways to complement the data and sources you have with something else. All the tools we presented today were complementary.

Diana: I can add a clear example. I was mentioning how I use ActivityInfo as a social listening tool. However, we were triangulating data with the feedback and complaint mechanism that we had implemented. This is how I was checking if the information is reliable. When something surprising pops up, try to see if it's logical and then make some investigations using other tools to triangulate.

Tetyana: The reliability of the data also comes with the explanation. If you are providing the reasons behind particular trends that you see in your data and you are able to explain them to the management, then the question regarding reliability will disappear. It is about building the processes that would lead you to verifiable and reliable data and being conscious about this.