Much of the world has ground to a halt in the last week, and I expect it will continue this way for some time.
Our 60 Decibels team has been looking for ways we can help directly, and we’ve put together some resources I’d like to share.
First, yesterday we shared the 60 Decibels Remote Survey Toolkit. It is a new, free 19-page guide on how to successfully conduct research work remotely. This is a response to the fact that virtually all face-to-face research has stopped in reaction to COVID-19, and many organizations are scrambling to shift some or all of that data-gathering to mobile phones.
Since our 60 Decibels team has been conducting phone-based surveys for the past six years, we thought it would be helpful to compile some of the lessons we’ve learned about how to gather high-quality feedback and social performance data remotely. This Toolkit capture the most important lessons we’ve learned in speaking to more than 120,000 customers in 35 countries.
In addition, we have a network of more than 200 trained enumerators in 30+ countries who speak 40 languages (ready for the list? It’s awesome: Amharic, Arabic, Assamese, Bangla (Bangladesh), Bemba, Bengali (India), Bisayas, Burmese, Chichewa, English, French, Gujarati, Hausa, Hindi, Igbo, Japanese, Kinyariwanda, Kiswahili, Krio, Luganda, K’iche, Kannada, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Mandarin, Marathi, Nepali, Oromo, Oriya/Odia, Pidgeon English, Portuguese, Punjabi, Q’eqchi, Shona, Siswati, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Tamil, Tigrinya, Telugu, Twi, Urdu, Wolaiytigna, Wolof, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu.)
While we have, so far, used this network to conduct our own work, we’re having lots of conversations with other research organizations to see if we can help them keep their work on track. If this network might be helpful to you, please let me know.
Finally, we are going to take steps to integrate questions about COVID-19 and its impacts into all our ongoing 60 Decibels surveys. While there are already some great initiatives tracking the impacts of COVID-19 globally, like this one created by Harvard, Cambridge, Warwick, and 7 other universities, they are mostly online-only and won’t capture the voice of the 3.5 billion people who don’t have a smartphone.
While it’s just one small piece of a much, much bigger puzzle, we hope that the work of listening, especially to those most impacted by the many hardships the world has to offer, can continue through these challenging times.
Stay safe, stay positive, and let’s take good care of each other.
