Building the opportunity to learn and iterate throughout the process is critical to creating something that achieves your goals, and documents what you’re learning so you can apply those insights to future projects. You’ll want to think about both internal and external forms of documentation. Internal documentation helps you refine your ideas and document the process so you can learn from it over time. External evaluation will help you assess whether your project was effective in meeting your goals.
Here are some of the ways to think about learning from your work throughout the lifespan of your project:
At the outset, consider whether there are particular external benchmarks you might want to capture that are specific and meaningful. These might include mindsets on an issue in a particular region or country that can be documented through surveys and sentiment analysis. It could be the number of elected officials who have expressed support. If you’ve been successful in pulling an evaluator onto your project team, they’ll have good insights about what to capture in terms of benchmarks at the outset of your effort.
You might work with the evaluator to examine ways in which your theory of change can be tracked and measured over time. As you build out your plan for evaluation, you’ll want to draw on your answers to the four questions. Your answers for each will offer insights for how to measure success. For example, if you’ve clearly identified what it is you want to be different in a specific and observable way, you’ll know whether the legislation passed, dollars were invested in enforcement, or companies created new policies. If you’ve narrowly defined the people you’re hoping to reach, identifying whether you’ve reached and engaged them will be a simpler task.
And, if you’ve identified a clear, actionable and specific call to action, you’ll be able to observe whether people have accepted and acted on that call.
Throughout each step of your effort, you’ll want to test what you’re creating with people who are representative of those who will use what you’re building. Prototyping, seeking, and applying feedback is essential to building tools people will use, and that co-exist with their habits. It’s important to collect feedback on your work. What makes complete sense in your mind may be indecipherable to someone else. This phenomenon is known as the “Curse of Knowledge,’ which is essentially that once we know something, it’s near impossible to imagine what it’s like not to. So when we create tools or resources–particularly for people who don’t share your expertise, you’re doing so with the bias that they know what you know. To break the curse, you have to get out of your head and into someone else’s.
Here are some steps you can use to assess whether readers and viewers are taking away the right message. Some might require a budget or skill set, but most just include a few extra steps and careful observation.
Start by prototyping. Sketch out your ideas, and provide enough detail about what would be included in what you’ve developed. If you can design it, do. Share your prototype with people who represent the kinds of people you hope to reach. Connect with the focal point for a country or region to identify which kinds of people are most likely to use the report in their work, and engage with them to get culturally relevant feedback. These same people could be the ones you interviewed in the early stages of the project.
If you can’t access them, the next best choice is anyone with different expertise, and for whom the concept you’re trying to present is new.
Use their feedback to make your project clearer, tighten up the language and switch out imagery that may have been unclear. As you go through this process, it’s helpful to maintain a growth mindset about feedback. Feedback isn’t positive or negative–it’s just information.
It can be helpful to develop two versions of your product and compare their strengths with the people you’re hoping will use them. This form of simple experimentation is called a/b testing. News outlets and marketers use a/b testing to make visuals, headlines and any other communication stronger. They’ll produce 2 or more versions of the same product, share it with a small subset of their target audience, and use the one that gets the most engagement.
You can also learn from what you have. Use web site analytics, Google news alerts and image searches to identify similar products that have gotten high levels of engagement. Draw insights from each of these to iterate and refine what you’ve created, and track engagement with what you’ve built over time.
It can be particularly important to test infographics and data visualizations through this approach, because our intuition about effective graphics does not always correspond to “evidence-informed” best practices for increasing accessibility. Using a human-centered design approach of testing and iteration can help you ensure that what you’re creating works for the people you’re building it for.
Once you’ve completed your project, you might consider conducting an after-action review. An after-action review is a systemized way of reviewing how you approached a project, the decisions you made along the way. In terms of internal documentation, you might also think about establishing a shared document where you and your team members can journal about the process.
Additionally, these kinds of workshops and webinars create opportunities to collect feedback and insights that you can apply to future efforts.
