Tracking Impact with Voices of Venezuela
Our Partner: Voices of Venezuela
Originally sponsored by the US Agency for International Development and the Inter-American Development Bank, Voices of Venezuela is an award-winning, migrant-led media and comms initiative from Art For Impact (Colombia) and Tech Equalized (USA) that connects migrant groups to information by government institutions and NGOs. Having been one of 10 nonprofits selected for the Chat for Impact Summit Accelerator sponsored by WhatsApp, it has seen 38,000 users and 650,000 direct messages exchanged through free WhatsApp(and Messenger) helplines that connect refugees and migrants to services and information leading to self-sufficiency and integration into their host communities. The tools they are building and testing with this population are designed for building community momentum, equitable access to information, and increasing sector impact across multiple needs (and include developing NLP models to identify migrant needs and make recommendations, as well create other omni-chat tools). A demo of their product is here.
The Problem
Venezuela has the world’s second-largest migration crisis in scale, only slightly smaller than Syria, yet there has been less than 10% of the Syrian funding per person. In total, over 6 million Venezuelans have left their country in search of a better future, the situation stemming from an economic crisis with an almost incomprehensibly high inflation rate that stems, at least in part, from widespread corruption and mismanagement of resources, leading to increased violence and a lack of everyday necessities such as food and medicine.
Voices of Venezuela has direct conversations with thousands of Venezuelan migrants a week through live Q&As, helplines, and social media (especially on Facebook). In the process of having these conversations, they discovered the potential of the data to diagnose other community challenges (for example, they found that some services being advertised to the public that weren’t actually available, and they often see patterns of users interested in additional services in other areas which allows them to see multifaceted needs). Because social media is one of the main sources of community outreach for organizations, it’s important to be able to track these metrics in a very easy way.
Our Solution: Impact Monitoring Webapp
Overview
The goal of this partnership was for T4SG to give Voices of Venezuela and similar organizations a way to determine and measure their impact in order to aid future decisions. We accomplished this in the form of an impact-monitoring webapp which integrates APIs from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram in order to capture social media KPIs mainly relating to awareness, engagement, and action metrics. Our app periodically makes calls to each of these APIs of a given user’s social media accounts and stores the most recent data in our database for when the user loads the metrics in the dashboard.
Social Media Metrics
Post Metrics: total comments, likes, shares
Page Metrics: total followers, fans (followers who like the page), page reviews
Awareness: total followers, following, tweets, listed
Engagement: total tweet likes and retweets + average likes and retweets per tweet
Growth: average # likes and retweets for the 10 most recent tweets + for the 50 most recent tweets
YouTube
Each channel: total views and subscribers; search positions of a channel on YouTube Search
Each video: total number of views, likes, and comments
Awareness: followers, impressions, reach, views
Engagement: likes, comments, actions
Main Features
User Dashboard
Data for the user’s own organization is displayed in the User Dashboard on the home page. Once their account is authenticated, they will be able to view all of the metrics mentioned above for their organization. These metrics are queried from the APIs periodically and stored in the database.
Compare
Each organization is assigned a grouping based on features such as size, type of organization (governmental, nonprofit, etc), level of work (local, national, etc), and geographic location. In the Compare Dashboard, user’s are able to select from a list of similar organizations, which have the same classification as the user’s organization, and compare their own metrics against other organizations’.
Org Settings
Here, each organization can configure their organization type (which determines which group they belong to) and add in their social media accounts (this requires authentication).
Admin Functionality
Voices of Venezuela will have the administrative role of managing groups — creating labels and defining the criteria for each group.
Potential Expansions
What we built out this semester was a baseline impact monitor, but there are many ways to expand upon it. The following lists possible features to grow this product:
- Benchmarking: Currently, the Compare page simply shows a side-by-side view of the user’s metrics versus those of a similar organization’s. One possible expansion of this is to integrate some data analytic work to develop benchmarks for each metric based on the aggregated metrics from all of the organizations in the user’s group. This would allow for a more comprehensive view of where the user is in comparison to their immediate circle.
- Data visualization: We included but did not end up using a graph component to visualize the metrics. Since we implemented the graphs already with placeholder data, the only thing left to implement is the logic of pulling the user’s actual metrics from the backend.
- Additional social media platforms: Initially, the MVP for this project included LinkedIn and Google Analytics APIs, but due to their complicated verification processes, we decided to cut it down to the platforms listed above. Another platform that we considered was TikTok, but its lack of any standardized APIs created problems for us. Later on down the road, it might be useful to revisit some of these platforms, especially as the number of users of this impact monitor expands, as different organizations have different platforms that they concentrate on.
- Multiple social media accounts: Oftentimes, organizations, particularly those on the larger side, will have multiple accounts on each social media platform (i.e. the Red Cross might have separate accounts for different countries). A useful feature would be the option of adding more dashboards corresponding to different accounts in the User’s page and having the ability to customize them.
The Impact
This project will give grassroots organizations, nonprofits, and social impact organizations a meaningful and standardized way to measure their impact and justify funding or know when a pivot is needed to better help their beneficiaries. They are working with other nonprofits and mayor’s offices, and government institutions. They are currently scaling up to a regional focus, which makes this project all the more important in a time of rapid growth (they currently focus on Colombia where there are 2M Venezuelan migrants but want to extend outwards to Peru, Ecuador, and other countries that also have large migrant populations).
Furthermore, the larger vision of the product is to be a larger impact-tracking tool. Though this tool would focus on being a social media tracking platform, it would eventually integrate important social metrics (indexes on poverty, health access, suicide rate, etc.) and track interactions that happen over helplines or websites to provide a comprehensive view of how a nonprofit interacts with its beneficiaries.
Acknowledgements
We’d like to thank the Harvard Computer Society Tech for Social Good and Voices of Venezuela for connecting us with this wonderful opportunity. We also want to thank Jason Rovig and Nery Santaella for their support throughout the project!