Responsive listening through improved feedback mechanisms

What is the humanitarian need?

Few feedback systems help staff coordinate with partners to manage the workflow associated with collecting, managing and responding to feedback received from communities affected by crisis. This is particularly true for informal feedback gathered face-to-face, which can offer the most insightful information available to humanitarian actors.
This prevents actors from learning what they are doing well, identifying gaps and leveraging mechanisms to coordinate across multiple actors. Good practice will always involve multiple channels offering options to give feedback. However, there is no system that brings these together as a coherent referral mechanism, including efficient handling of feedback.

What is the innovative solution?

This solution will focus on how we can innovatively collect report and analyse the data we receive – not just from specific country locations but also through regional reporting across multiple humanitarian projects and countries. This project will be applicable across other humanitarian and development programming, leading to the potential for global reporting on community feedback. Having a system that works as a referral mechanism right from the point of collection will not only support staff to automate a workflow allowing for faster action, but effectively close the feedback loop with communities. Crucially, more can be done with data once collected – moving beyond individual feedback to finding trends and altering our response based on the feedback, to altering national/regional/global strategy and feeding learning into the sector. Furthermore, this system has the potential to be cross-organisational with feedback being collected and referred between agencies working in the same environment.

What are the expected outcomes?

This innovation will allow humanitarian responses to be more accountable and responsive, ultimately improving real life outcomes for communities in crisis. Improving data reporting and analytics will enable staff to be more informed, take swifter action when required and use evidence to influence the programme where valuable. Where funding streams allow the reallocation of resources in crisis contexts, this can be done quickly and accurately to meet urgent needs evidenced with readily available feedback. It allows granular quantitative and qualitative details about service delivery to be accessed from a database while the project is still ongoing – auto-generating some of the simpler measures, avoiding communication delay, and saving staff time by negating the need for write-ups. It will improve Oxfam and our partners’ ability to plan, monitor, evaluate, be accountable and learn from our programming as we are more responsive to the needs of the community.