Insights from recent projects #3
We’re wrapping up our Insights from Recent Projects blog series with this final instalment. If you missed them, give our first and second reflections a read!
Stakeholder engagement with Team Diaspora
Our team has had several projects that have challenged us to think creatively about how we engage with stakeholders. We learned that adapting our approach makes a significant difference in participation and the quality of the data we collected. Here’s how we tailored our strategies for 3 stakeholder groups.
Reaching busy farmers
On our agricultural and primary production projects farmers are often our key stakeholders, but their demanding schedules and long hours make them challenging to engage. Traditional interview methods like 45-minute online interviews are not practical. To make participation easier, we switched to short, targeted phone calls, each with around 5 questions, that could be completed while farmers were on-the-go in 5-10 minutes. This personal and flexible approach meant more farmers could share their valuable insights, without disrupting their day.
Engaging young people in focus groups
Engaging young people, particularly on evaluation topics program logics and key evaluation questions can be challenging. Evaluation concepts are complex and not always exciting. To maintain interest and encourage meaningful participation from young people in evaluation design workshops, we:
- switched activities throughout the session, and included lots of physical movement around the room, to keep energy levels high
- broke out into smaller groups to ensure everyone was engaged and able to contribute
- leveraged Teams chat features in online sessions, which allowed participants to use emoji reactions if they preferred not to speak. This made feedback fun, quick, and accessible.
Adapting our approach and collaborating with schools for case studies
Schools are busy environments. Our initial approach to undertaking a case study method of data collection in schools involved conducting both staff and student focus groups and distributing a survey. This proved to be too demanding for schools with full schedules, and we struggled to recruit schools to be involved in a full case study. We decided to make our method more flexible by allowing schools to select the elements that suited them, whether it was just a staff focus group or staff and student focus groups without a survey. This adaptability increased school participation and ensured we were able to collect important insights on implementation in practice.
