For the past six months, the GO team have been collecting perspectives on the platform using a variety of methods, a process known as the GO Study. In this blog, we present the key findings, what they mean for the future of GO and describe how they have already been used to guide a recent GO sprint involving all IFRC Regional Offices and our GO developer and user experience teams.
GO Study 2022 — methods and overall results
The study involved nearly 300 participants over four months, using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, informed by a member-centred design approach. We spoke with many National Society colleagues (in fact they represented almost 3/4s of participants) as well as representation from the five IFRC Secretariat regions and management within the NSDOC division and Digitalisation and IT department.
The tl:dr version is that GO is heading in a good direction but needs to strengthen in the following areas:
Focus on National Societies — GO is seen as a good vehicle to support the IFRC’s Agenda for Renewal, however there is plenty of scope to develop services and awareness to allow National Societies to benefit from the platform for domestic emergency operations. We are encouraged to work directly with National Societies to learn their needs for the platform.
Be Operationally Useful — GO is widely used and recognised for strategic level decision-making and representation; it is less used at the operational level except as a reference. We need to move GO from “show and tell’ to “show and do”, meaning we should prioritise new features and data analysis flows that explicitly serve decision-makers’ needs.
Harmonise, Integrate and Leverage IFRC data — GO is the key information source on IFRC network emergencies. This role should be reinforced and leveraged to enable more agility, lighter processes while also building the collective evidence base and potential for analysis.
The GO study proposes a series of next steps. The first was achieved through holding a GO sprint from 19–23rd Sept to evaluate the insights and prioritise some quick wins with the extended GO team, more details below. Following this, we aim to (re)clarify the vision for GO, and then build awareness and collective buy-in through a newly constituted GO Advisory Group.
The GO study is written provocatively in order to stimulate positive change and continued improvement. The findings are therefore presented in a way which might seem critical, this is deliberate and meant to encourage debate and further engagement.
Focus on National Societies
According to the Study, the target audience of GO are donor National Societies (NS) and IFRC secretariat. Disaster-affected NS were mentioned as more a potential, rather than current, target group. The potential to give these NS more control and opportunities to share their needs and “own their data” has not yet been realised, limiting GO’s awareness and utility.
Our reaction to this is complete agreement. Although originally demoed by a group of National Societies (American, British and Netherlands RCs), GO was developed primarily by the IFRC secretariat and so consequently most strongly reflects the available data and user perspectives that are apparent for that user group. While NS continue to fund the majority of the platform, and some donate people and time to develop features, we need to more closely integrate with disaster-affected NS to better understand their preferences, limitations and ideas.
We intend to tackle this through two main lines of action. First, we will identify some champion NS users of GO and work closely with them to identify how we can meet their needs, building features to meet their specific requirements. Secondly, we will form a GO Advisory Group, made up largely of NS, which can help to balance the development priorities for the platform towards their needs.
Be operationally useful
The GO Study claims that GO currently is the one tool to access to know about emergency activities across the IFRC network. It has become indispensable to gain a high-level overview and as an important tool for membership coordination, as it unites all the RCRC members within one space. Nevertheless, according to the participants, GO is currently not geared towards operational effectiveness — it is not ‘real-time’ enough and is not explicitly meeting decision-makers needs and processes.
This is truly a challenge to the purpose and intended use for GO. As the GO team, our ultimate aim has been to identify the data and processes that can be positively influenced to help the IFRC network make better, evidence-informed decisions. For instance, we have invested significantly in recent months to enable one of the key resource allocation processes in the IFRC, i.e. the DREF, to become integrated on the platform — but we recognise there is much more to do.
We intend to tackle this by prioritising the inclusion of more operational processes on the platform. This will include supporting the development of surveys to inform assessments, as well as semi-automating the visualisation of data collected; it will include surfacing historical response and projected crisis data to help operations management stay risk-informed; it will also include simple tools to help improve planning such as a mapmaking feature and by curating key information to help with contextual analysis.
Harmonise, Integrate and Leverage IFRC data
The GO Study surfaced a number of issues with the platform as it has been developed due to its up-to-now modular development approach. As a result of this approach, there are many inconsistencies for different workflows and an overall lack of navigational coherence which leads to valuable data and features being underused.
We understood this to be a call from participants to simplify and standardise user workflows on GO by ensuring consistency in lists of indicators, activities, geographic data, hazard typologies. We also see that there is a lot of potential to improve and harmonise the navigational and analytical tools on the platform, such as maps, charts, tables and so on. We intend also to integrate currently standalone modules to ensure relevant data appears seamlessly in different workflows, e.g. learning from past operations is surfaced during the DREF application process and not just on a dashboard on one part of the site. Finally, we invited opinions and validated a new navigational logic for the site, which we intend to implement from global to operation and country levels in 2023.
These enhancements are ultimately intended to make GO the ‘canonical’ source of truth for emergency data across the IFRC network, therefore building trust and accountability. To do this, we also see the unifying logic of what belongs on GO to be the IFRC analytical framework and its intended organising principle for operational decision-making.
Turning Study into Action — notes from a GO sprint in Nepal
Every six months or so, we come together to focus on the platform and make progress on some larger pieces of work. This time, thanks to funding support from the Australian Red Cross, we were able to include the GO developers, UI/UX specialists and IM Coordinators from the IFRC Regional Office. It was a special moment for the team, some of whom had been working together on GO for years without seeing each other face-to-face.
The energy, solutions, rapport and memories we built together during the week will power GO for some months and years to come. We will need it, given the list of improvements our IFRC network expect.
Please dive into our notes from the GO sprint above.
Special thanks to Australian Red Cross, who funded the GO study, sprint and much of the development work on the platform in 2022. If you would like to hear more about our work, or offer financial or material support, please contact im@ifrc.org
A final thanks once again to the GO team. Particular thanks to the ToggleCorp / DataFriendlySpace colleagues for hosting the GO Sprint and being such great partners in recent years, Maryam from Yellow Umbrella for compiling the GO Study and helping us to think through its implications and friends/colleagues from Development Seed who have been with us from the start and continue to shine.
No time to rest
Just do your best
What you hear is not a test
We’re only here to make you … GO
