Harnessing Survey Data Analytics for stakeholder impact assessment
In today's interconnected world, harnessing the power of data has become crucial for driving positive social change. With technological advancements and the increasing availability of digital tools, survey data analysis has emerged as a game-changer in understanding societal challenges and designing effective interventions. This article explores the transformative potential of data-driven approaches and demonstrates the impact of innovative survey data analysis on creating meaningful social change with an example organization, Coaching Excellence (CCE). The Coalition for Coaching Excellence (CCE) is a worldwide group that helps professional coaches and organizations improve through coaching capacity building.
CCE forms strong relationships that show how powerful coaching can be. It strengthens organizations worldwide and shows that coaching is crucial to a thriving society. CCE is all about how coaching can change communities and people's lives.
They have a program called Accelerate that proves this belief. Accelerate aims to inspire people everywhere through education. It wants to spread the benefits of coaching far and wide, leading to significant societal improvements.
Unraveling Impact Analytics Challenges
The Coalition for Coaching Excellence (CCE) believes in listening to its people. But, like many groups, they have trouble using surveys to do this. One problem is getting the survey results to everyone in the CCE.
The primary reason, survey-based question-by-question reporting does not give any insight. Second, the Director of Social Impact at CCE is too frustrated that data aggregation is much more complicated. Unfortunately, this is the story of most mission-driven organizations using surveys to find continuous insight. To do this, they must use Excel to make sense of the data. This can be hard and take a long time, especially when combining data from over 40 partners.
Many groups like the CCE use surveys but can't always get the information they need from them. This can be frustrating, especially when they must make different reports for the funders, who give them the resources to meet their mission. In addition, this task can be random, full of mistakes, boring, and takes a lot of time. For example, when a team member needs specific data for a funder, the person in charge has to spend a lot of time getting it.
- Downloading all CSV and XLS from individual survey responses
- Cleaning up, transforming data
- Translating responses from different languages
- Building reports in XLS so that they can provide results
This exercise repeats countless times. As a result, CCE hires consultants to create an impact study. To the Director of Social Impact, the results are frustrating as they don't offer clear impact evidence.
Fortunately, there is a better approach:
It is essential to follow a structured approach to maximize the effectiveness of survey data analysis.
The Soapct team partnered with CCE to redesign the process for successful implementation as follows. There are two secret sauces to success.
- Develop a survey design process to get deep insight
- Choose analytics that integrates seamlessly with an advanced survey platform
Develop a survey design process to get deep insight
Design a logic model:
Begin by designing a logic model that outlines your programs or initiatives' desired outcomes and impacts. This model is a roadmap for aligning your survey questions with the expected results. For example, if your coaching program aims to improve leadership skills, your survey questions can focus on assessing changes in participants' leadership abilities.
Align output and outcome with survey questions:
Ensure that your survey questions are aligned with both the output (the immediate results of your programs) and the desired outcome (the long-term impact). This alignment allows for a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of your initiatives. For instance, if your coaching program aims to enhance employability, your survey questions can explore participants' job prospects, skills gained, and career advancement.
Design a survey with critical fields for slicing and dicing:
Create a well-structured survey with key fields for slicing and dicing the data. These fields can include partner name, region, country, demographics, program, and more. Incorporating these fields allows you to analyze the data from different angles and gain valuable insights. For example, by analyzing survey responses based on demographic factors, you can identify if there are any disparities or variations in impact across different groups.
Include good qualitative and quantitative questions:
To strike a balance in survey design, it's important to blend both qualitative and quantitative questions. Quantitative questions, like ratings or Likert scales, provide structured, measurable data. On the other hand, qualitative questions offer a space for open-ended responses, allowing participants to share detailed experiences and insights. This combination enables a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the survey's impact, marrying numerical data with rich narratives. For detailed guidance on effectively using these types of questions, you can refer to articles at Sopact University on qualitative and quantitative surveys and on using open-ended questions.
Align survey questions with impact dimensions:
Incorporate survey questions that align with the five dimensions of impact from the Impact Management Project (IMP): What, Who, How Much, Contribution, and Risk. These dimensions help assess various aspects of impact, such as the nature of the change, the beneficiaries, the scale of the impact, the attribution to your programs, and the potential risks involved. This comprehensive approach ensures a holistic analysis of the impact achieved.
Reduce data fatigue
Tailor your survey to accommodate user-generated data, which can provide unique insights and perspectives beyond predefined questions. This additional input or feedback from participants offers valuable information that might not be captured through predetermined queries alone. Encouraging active contributions of thoughts, ideas, and suggestions fosters a sense of ownership and engagement among participants.
However, it's important to note that if the Coalition for Coaching Excellence (CCE) already possesses certain data such as demographics, SDG mapping, location, and partner information, there is no need to ask these questions again. Repetitive inquiries can lead to data collection fatigue. Instead, focus on gathering data that is most relevant and impactful. This approach ensures that participants provide deep responses while minimizing bias.
For instance, if CCE has previously collected demographic information from participants in a different survey, they can skip those questions to streamline the survey and avoid redundancy. This not only saves participants' time but also enables CCE to concentrate on gathering data that will provide deeper insights into the impact of their coaching programs. By optimizing the survey design and minimizing repetitive questions, CCE can enhance the overall survey experience for participants while collecting meaningful and actionable data.
Rely on Survey-based reporting for a quick review Only and not data analysis:
While survey-based reporting is suitable for quick reviews, traditional approaches often present data in a static and question-by-question format. The Coalition for Coaching Excellence (CCE) relies on Sopact's Impact Cloud to enable comprehensive data aggregation, slicing, and dicing. This powerful platform offers impact data integration and analytics capabilities, empowering CCE to extract valuable insights from their survey data. With the Impact Cloud, CCE can effortlessly aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources, enabling in-depth exploration and informed decision-making.
By following these practices and leveraging the capabilities of the Sopact Survey, the Coalition for Coaching Excellence (CCE) can design surveys that align with their logic model, capture meaningful data, and generate comprehensive insights. This enables CCEs to continuously monitor and evaluate their impact, make data-informed decisions, and drive positive social progress through coaching.
Key to success is well-defined survey data methods and proper use of impact data analysis. Consider using Sopact for impact data analytics.
You can also use the same data with other analytics platforms like Tableau or PowerBI. Sopact Analytics is a robust and user-friendly platform. It's based on Apache Superset and allows for unlimited dashboards. Plus, it's excellent for integrating stakeholder data.
Survey Analysis Methods
CCE has started using the Sopact Survey tool to overcome its challenges. This tool allows us to shift from static to dynamic reporting. As a result, they can analyze survey data in minutes and not days!
Now, the whole team can access the data.
Gone are the days Director of Social Impact responded to each query and spent days compiling the results. Instead, she provides a link to a live real-time dashboard. Team members can break down results by partners, regions, programs, SDGs, and demographics. This fixes a big problem they had with old survey tools.
The Sopact Survey tool is designed with a focus on outcomes. It lines up with the 17 UN SDGs. "We use it to collect data before, during, and after coaching from our clients. In addition, the tool lets us collect data offline, adding more valuable data to our dashboard."
The unique feature of the Sopact Survey tool is its ability to use data from Smartsheets, Qualtrics, and Survey Monkey. They replaced three survey tools with a single Sopact Survey.
The Sopact Survey tool also supports collecting data in different languages and standardizes it. This is a big deal for global organizations like CCE. It lets them connect with a diverse range of stakeholders.
At the Coalition for Coaching Excellence, they work hard to use data to drive social progress. "Using the Sopact Survey tool, we're not solving our problems. But we're also increasing our positive impact on society."
Multilingual Data Collection for Global Impact
The importance of multilingual surveys is paramount in the modern, globalized context, as emphasized in the article "Mastering Multilingual Surveys: Strategies for Effective Collection and Analysis of Diverse Responses" available at university.sopact.com. Organizations working across various linguistic regions often face challenges with language barriers. Traditional survey translation and response processing methods are time-consuming, delaying the acquisition of timely insights.
The Sopact Survey tool, with its support for over 80 languages, revolutionizes this process. It uses auto-translation features powered by Microsoft's cognitive services or other AI Suite providers, making survey translation straightforward and quick. The tool's AI-driven approach is especially effective in handling the complexities of translating open-ended questions, ensuring coherent analysis regardless of the original language. This capability not only addresses language barriers but also unlocks deeper insights from diverse demographics, enhancing the impact of data-driven strategies in social purpose organizations.
The Power of Data Aggregation
Data aggregation is another vital aspect of the work at CCE. With Impact Cloud, they can aggregate data from multiple sources, rendering data analysis more comprehensive and insightful. Impact Cloud integrates data from Smart Sheets, Qualtrics, and Survey Monkey in real-time, allowing us to combine data from various sources.
While this is useful for historical data, we recommend transitioning all data collection to Sopact Survey as it simplifies data aggregation. By collecting all data via a single platform, you can avoid the complexities associated with integrating data from multiple sources and ensure that your data analysis is more efficient and reliable.
Embracing the Future of Survey Data Analytics
"At the Coalition for Coaching Excellence, we firmly believe in the transformative power of data. With Sopact Survey at our disposal, we have fully leveraged the potential of data analytics to further our mission of advancing societal progress through coaching."
By enabling dynamic reporting, outcome-oriented strategies, offline data collection, multilingual data collection, and efficient data aggregation, Sopact Survey has revolutionized how it works with data. As they continue to harness the power of this tool, they look forward to creating an even more significant impact on the society they serve.
Join them on our journey toward creating a thriving society through the power of coaching and data analytics.
Learn More: Impact measurement
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