Where are National Society local units? (All 160,000 of them!)

National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies work with local communities from physical offices spread throughout their country. During an emergency response, knowing where these locations are can be critical to answer operational questions such as:

• Who should respond, and what capacity do they have?
• Where should an operations base be setup?
• Are there nearby warehouses where equipment or in-kind supplies can be stored?
• Where are volunteers based and how many might be available?

A local unit for the Mexican Red Cross. Where is this on the map?

Each National Society faces the same big challenge of collecting and maintaining their location data. When you multiply that by 192 National Societies (which comes to over 160,000 local units worldwide), you realise the challenge to provide a tool that can enable collection of this data across the globe.

GO is the home of IFRC operational data. As everything happens somewhere it is a long-term goal of the site to make geospatial data and semi-automated mapping more accessible across the Movement. National Society local unit locations are a big part of that goal as this could have many benefits to the users of GO — for analysis, coordination, providing more local context to overlay over situational mapping, to associate with response actions including through the DREF, or exported to be used elsewhere.

We wanted to explore this whole topic in detail so pulled together a small team and ran a design sprint to focus on the challenge with the aim of learning a lot in a short amount of time.

What is a local unit?

Each National Society is structured differently and often use different terms to describe their locations. In order to prevent misunderstanding that can come from using other terms (such as a branch, which can have a different meaning depending on the National Society), we use the definition from the 2019 Everyone Counts report that defines a local unit as:

Any National Society physical offices that work directly with communities — these can include local chapters, subdivisions, branches, regional and intermediate offices and headquarters.

What do we mean by a sprint?

We started out wanting to do this by-the-book. Specifically Jake Knapp’s Sprint book on ‘how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days’.

The initial aim was for five full days, in person, finishing with a tested prototype on Friday. But with limited time and availability, we had to scale back to 3 full days (without the prototyping and testing). And then, with Covid restrictions biting once more, we eventually had to move things online, so we reduced to 3x half days to reduce the dreaded Zoom (or Teams) fatigue.

The plan

We assembled a great team of nine enthusiastic (impressively so for an early December week) people from different teams across IFRC, ICRC, National Societies and our partners Yellow Umbrella and CartONG.

We started with the broad aim to:

Provide a tool for National Societies to manage and access their local unit point locations.

The plan was for two days of learning from existing projects and National Societies, with a day to try and make sense of it all and think about the next steps.

Day 1 — Existing projects

This is definitely not the first project to focus on this topic. So, on day 1, we wanted to hear from past and current efforts to tackle the same, or similar, challenge scope.

We welcomed representatives of nine initiatives to share their experience through semi-structured interviews asking:

1. Can you give a brief summary of the project
2. What were the outputs and can you share them?
3. What were the challenges?
4. What were the successes?
5. What are your expectations of this project?

As we heard from them, the team captured notes (189 digital post-its to be precise), whilst also constantly capturing their thoughts on the broader project challenges, questions to be answered and ideas/features for the final product.

What did we learn (or reinforce)?

• We’re definitely not starting from scratch and should build on the successes of these projects and learn from the challenges
• We need to be careful to avoid duplication of efforts and data
• We need to be clear on the scope and definition of what we’re aiming to do
• The needs of National Societies vary greatly

There were also some big questions that need to be addressed:

• How do we make it community centred and incentivise people to add their data?
• How do we ensure data quality and allow for validation?

Day 2 — National Societies

Next up we heard from people at National Societies who have experience mapping local units. After all, this is National Society data and success for the initiative is dependent on meeting their needs as data contributors and users.

We heard from individuals from Democratic Republic of Congo, Finland, Guatemala, Guinea, Honduras, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, UK and Vanuatu! It was fascinating (and eye-opening) to hear about so many different approaches and tools that are already being used to great effect. But we also learnt about their challenges and what the opportunities might be for this project.

The core team continued to capture notes (356 digital post-its this time) and think about the wider challenges, questions and ideas/features to be explored later in the week.

What did we learn (or need to address)?

• It’s challenging to have a complete and up-to-date dataset of local units at a national level — but there are some great initiatives working towards achieving this
• With so many national systems already in place, how do we avoid duplication? Is this tool even needed for some National Societies?
• How do we add value, rather than burden, for collecting and aggregating data?
• When building a Movement-wide tool — how do you prioritise and ensure it is user centric for such a wide range of user needs?
• We need to further explore and be honest about the motivations for sharing data — for benefit of National Societies, Secretariat, or a community approach that we build this dataset together.

Day 3 — Making sense of it all

With a barrage of useful information and discussion, it was time to make sense of things (or try to). As you can see from our Miro board, there was a lot to digest:

Screenshot of the notes taken on Miro hearing about existing projects and from National Societies.

With the facilitation of Mariam from the design agency Yellow Umbrella, we filled in their Discovery Canvas to structure our thoughts and discussion. You can see the whole Canvas below, but we’ll expand on some sections.

Yellow Umbrella’s Discovery Canvas — used to structure our thoughts and takeaways.

Product description

We started with the product description — answering the ‘why’ this product should exist. You can see the post-it notes in the screenshot but the themes were:

Screenshot from the Miro board — Product description on the Discovery Canvas

• Ensuring a bottom-up process and giving ownership and choice to the National Societies
• Providing standardisation — with the aim to bringing together currently siloed initiatives
• Creating and sharing a globally aggregated dataset, which acts as a source for operations
• Making geospatial data more accessible! — You shouldn’t need to be a GIS professional to contribute or make use of this data

The users

The majority of time was spent thinking about the different users — who are they, what will they do with the product, and why do they need it (what is the value to them)? The broad user groups were identified as:

• National Society data contributor
• National Society data user
• IFRC / ICRC data user
• RCRC partners
• Public / donors?

You can explore the Discovery Canvas for more detail on all these user groups but this is a definite next step to dig into these in more detail and validate our assumptions on the needs and requirements.

Questions, Challenges and ideas

Next, we grouped the questions, challenges and ideas the team had been capturing through the week (see screenshot). As we discussed them we transferred these to the Discovery Canvas to have everything in one place.

Miro board of the challenges, questions and ideas captured through the week. These were then distilled and added to the Discovery Canvas.

Next steps

As we had to compress the process down to 3x half days, we didn’t get as far with digesting everything as we’d have liked to, but we do have some clear next steps to tackle:

• Expand on the user groups and their needs — create user stories that can then be validated with National Societies
• Come up with hypothesis of what this product might be and also validate them with National Societies — is this a product that they would use in the scenario we propose?
• Dig into and list out the big questions that need to be answered and decisions to be made. It’s going to be impossible to create a product that meets all needs so we need to be open about what decisions are made and how certain solutions/features are prioritised.

We’ll be kicking this off again in the New Year and continuing our research alongside developments in the data model and prototypes to move this towards a final product.

Summary

We finished the week with a presentation to all stakeholders and anyone interested. You can find the slides at the bottom.

The sprint was a great way to have a small team dedicate time and focus to make progress fast. It uncovered a lot of issues direct from those experienced in the challenge, which will be invaluable for the success of the project.

Having so many people join various sessions from across the Movement and external partners, was a testament to the collaborative nature of this process. We will be continuing like this and look forward to reporting what comes next.

Thank yous

We have to finish off with a round of thank yous for everyone who was involved especially Mariam, everyone from the core-team, and those who joined sessions from National Societies or existing projects. It was a genuinely enjoyable week — learnt so much but still so much to learn!

Summary slides