Authors: Stephanie Quail (ARTD), Sophie Henness (ARTD)Non-government organisations (NGOs) and small organisations often face a range of barriers, such as limited funding and staffing, to collecting, analysing, and utilising client and program data to support continuous improvement and decision making. For these organisations, taking an empowerment evaluation approach, which enables them to assess and improve their own programs while building capacity and ownership, has the potential to provide sustainable and ongoing value. Empowerment evaluation strengthens organisational capacity and equips organisations with tools to collect, analyse, and interpret data for ongoing program improvement.
This presentation explores low-cost and high-impact opportunities for embedding monitoring, as demonstrated by our recent work with Bonnie’s Support Service to develop internal capability to administer and analyse a new client satisfaction survey. We will highlight common challenges for small NGOs, and our approaches for setting up monitoring on a shoestring, including:
- How data is collected, including an overview of free or low-cost survey platforms, and their advantages and disadvantages
- How data is analysed, including how the free, open-source software R can be used to set up reproducible analysis that once established can be re-used without needing internal quantitative expertise
- How reports and other outputs are created, including how polished reports incorporating text, figures and tables can be generated using R.
Audience members will leave this presentation with an understanding of common challenges to setting up and analysing client satisfaction survey data, the advantages and disadvantages of available open-source platforms, and practical approaches for setting up reproducible analysis and reports. Attendees will receive a free online toolkit we have developed which organisations can use to guide the development of their own low-cost monitoring and reproducible reporting.
