Reliance on static reports and delayed audits creates project risk and skepticism among project investors and others who crave concrete evidence that projects are delivering. For such stakeholders, use of real-time data promises a much more transparent view into progress, challenges, and achievements. Impact Inside helps project proponents gather and use real-time project data to tell better project impact stories.
Here’s how we do it:
- Data Collection and Management: Impact Inside has built-in custom surveys and field data capture capabilities for project data collection via mobile app. Users create custom, targeted surveys that gather performance data on project activities, outcomes, and community engagement. The app also enables field agents and community workers to input data on-site, in real-time, entering survey responses, uploading photos, and reporting activities directly from the field. The app also works offline, ensuring data can be captured even in remote areas without internet access.
- Theory of Change Integration: Real-time data is closely tied to projects’ Theory of Change (ToC). As users input performance data through activities and outcomes mapped in the project ToC, the platform automatically connects this data to show how project actions help achieve desired results.
- Automated Reporting: Impact Inside’s AI Assistant facilitates creating project reports and visual summaries with real-time project performance data, including visualizations that show project progress, community feedback, and key performance indicators, making it easy for stakeholders to understand the story at any point in time.
- Dynamic Project Microsites and Community Portals: Impact Inside lets users create dynamic microsites that showcase their projects’ stories. These sites can integrate real-time data and visuals, helping communicate progress and impact to broad audiences, including stakeholders and community members.
- Data Visualization Tools: Impact Inside uses data visualization to turn complex datasets into engaging charts, graphs, and infographics to tell a compelling story.
- Feedback Mechanisms: Ongoing community and stakeholder engagement is facilitated through built-in real-time feedback mechanisms. This can include testimonials, suggestions, and evaluations of project activities, enriching the narrative of project stories with firsthand accounts and experiences from a project’s community.
- Impact Assessment Features: The platform tracks not only project outputs, but also outcomes and impacts, allowing users to assess the effectiveness of their initiatives. This holistic view supports storytelling by showing how a project is meeting its goals and contributing to broader environmental and social objectives.
By using real-time data collection paired with an encoded Theory of Change, employing AI to create automated reporting, and employing engaging visual storytelling techniques, Impact Inside lets practitioners tell compelling and transparent project stories that truly resonate.
