Introducing new IFRC GO country pages — the place to find National Red Cross and Red Crescent Society data
For the IFRC, enabling effective and efficient humanitarian response is synonymous with supporting local and national response capacities across the 191 National Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) Societies. Within this network of national HQs and branches there are volunteers wearing the red vest ready to provide assistance in virtually every community on earth. This blog tells the story of how the new IFRC GO country pages aims to represent and support those capacities, as well as connect them to information to help plan and respond to current and future emergency needs.
Serving our membership
The priorities and direction of GO are driven by our IFRC network, and particularly our members’ needs. In 2022, the GO study emphasised the needs and opportunities to better serve the domestic operations of our National Societies, aligning directly with IFRC’s vision for the future set out in Strategy 2030 to “Support and develop National Societies as strong and effective local actors”. In response, the GO Country Pages were conceptualised: a dedicated module to bring together data and information to support National Societies to deliver effective local humanitarian action.
We kicked off the project with enthusiasm, although soon came to realise the complexity of the task we’d undertaken — so many questions! How to produce a comprehensive and meaningful solution for 191 diverse organisations, operating in vastly different contexts and cultures? How to first find and then collate so many different data sources from across the RCRC network, and beyond? How to meet multiple user needs whilst providing a flexible and future-proof solution?
User research
To tackle these challenges, we started out with a single question: What do people want? Aiming to make the process as user-driven as possible, we began by talking with a lot of people! In addition to countless informal discussions, we contacted 67 people from across the RCRC network and conducted 38 semi-structured interviews. We aimed to find out what people wanted from the GO Country Pages: what data would they like to see, and what should it look like?
The Country Pages should serve both National Societies responding directly to emergencies, as well as facilitating other actors to work with those National Societies and provide appropriate, effective, and aligned support. With this in mind, we conducted the user research with as much geographic, thematic, and organisational diversity as possible: we included National Societies of different sizes across the world; IFRC staff at country, regional, and global levels; and across a wide range of thematic and programmatic areas.
Balancing diversity with commonality
This gathering of needs, wishes, and ideas provided a fascinating insight into the different perspectives across our broad RCRC network. Whilst some feedback was largely universal, such as wanting centralisation of the many data sources existing in the RCRC network, systematic differences also emerged.
Those acting in support to National Societies wanted reliable and up-to-date information to ensure that their support is aligned with the National Society’s own priorities. On the other hand, National Societies responding to emergencies domestically, enthused over GO being a promotional tool to showcase their response work, assist with securing funding and partnerships, and surface real-time data to a wider audience.
Different levels of data literacy also emerged from the user research, highlighting the importance of providing a headline message, whilst also offering data-enthusiasts an opportunity for more in-depth analysis.
Consolidate
To bring together and review the large and diverse results from the user research, a short but industrious 1-day sprint was held in March 2023. Participants included National Society and IFRC staff, specialists in Operations, NSD, IM, PMER, and Health.
We started out by reviewing the user research insights gathered and prioritising the results based on frequency and significance. Next, we added a dose of realism: which requests were actually possible to fulfil, given the data and information that exists? We discussed and bounced ideas around on data organisation and visualisation, and as we scribbled and sketched, it was fun to see the GO Country Pages starting to come to life.
Design and iterate
Beautiful though the sprint sketches and scribbles had been, it felt like a big milestone to see the first version of the wireframes developed by our User Centred Design team at Yellow Umbrella. The Country Pages were suddenly alive, real, and ready to GO!
We took the wireframes enthusiastically to the participants in the first round of user research, feeling excited to present what had been developed based on their input. Were the wireframes what they had imagined?
We recorded their feedback and made updates, including re-organising information, updating data sources, and adding descriptions. The wireframes also inspired plenty of new ideas too, which gave us the opportunity to explore the inclusion of even more data and information.
Data detective work
Developing the Country Pages was an interesting exploration into the world of NS data stored by the IFRC Secretariat. There were some beautifully structured and centralised datasets with established methods for data access — surely the stuff that data-driven dreams are made of. However, it turns out not every dataset is clean and made ready for analysis — who knew? — and we found plenty of NS data stored in imaginatively hard-to-reach places, inaccessible formats, or with no plan in place beyond endless collection, seemingly for its own sake.
Along the way, we were able to support with some improvements to data management, including developing APIs to enable real-time access to data on National Society Development funds and Organisational Capacity Assessments. Other datasets, such as data on IFRC Cash Initiatives, National Society statutes and National Society Digital Maturity Assessments, were deemed not yet ready for inclusion, however once data management and access has been established we will be keen to include them in future Country Page releases.
The Country Pages also draw data from many new data sources, including employing innovative methods such as web-scraping to compile datasets from web sources, such as on ICRC presence and IFRC Disaster Law. We also curated and integrated key country-level context, risk and seasonal data from many external sources, including GFDRR, HDR, UNICEF, UNDRR, ACAPS, INFORM, IPC, World Bank, and IDMC.
Publication and future discoveries to come
After much user feedback and changes, the Country Pages have now been published to GO. It has certainly been quite the journey — starting out with just inspiration and feedback from the GO user survey, to conducting user research across the vast RCRC network, leading to sketches which were turned into wireframes, followed by more feedback, and finally publication.
The strength of the RCRC network lies in its 191 National Societies and their networks of branches, and it is great to see this reflected in the GO Country Pages. We know that we have only revealed the tip of the iceberg, so we plan to focus this year’s GO study on how more National Society data workflows can be supported and uncovered through GO.
