Using Data to Influence Government Decisions

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Donors play a central role in ensuring that efforts seeking to improvegovernment accountability are impactful. This study surfaced severalways in which donors may be able to support governance dataactors in.• Developing products that are more responsive to user needsand political opportunities; and, as a result, are more likely toachieve greater adoption and impact.RECOMMENDATIONSFOR DONORSThis research study surfaced several ways in which donorscan support governance data actors toward realizinggreater impact; many of the recommendations may alsoapply to broader transparency and accountability initiatives.• Encouraging interactions and coalitions across traditionalstakeholder divides to build the understanding that is critical forconstructive collaboration.• Improving learning practices across the community to betteridentify and share what works and doesn’t, and to help integratethem into operational practice.Summary of Recommendations1. Discourage a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality2. Encourage systematic, scalable approaches to learning aboutusers3. Reduce the risk of “I am the user” syndrome4. Develop strong social design capacities5. Facilitate user peer exchange to grow the agency and influenceof the data user community6. Encourage cross-sector empathy building to strengthen learningprocesses and outcomes7. Encourage grantees to develop learning agendas based on howtarget communities of practice actually operate8. Set specific indicators and targets for tracking a grantee’s contributionsto broader community learning and process change9. Steer learning efforts toward community-wide process change(beyond organizational learning and peer exchange)9
Develop products that are moreresponsive to user needs and politicalopportunities1. Discourage a ‘build it and they willcome’ mentalityCivic technologists are becoming increasinglyskilled at assessing user needs andcreating tools to address these needs.However, many continue to assume oranticipate the needs of broadly defineduser groups and lack formal processes totest their assumptions. As a result, manytools produced struggle to achieve broaderusage and adoption. Resources are investedin their creation and then on incrementaltechnical improvements, but with littleevidence of how they influence governmentdecision-making. To discourage the ‘build itand they will come’ approach, donors can:Tie grantee support to workplansthat prioritize users early and often.Donors can motivate grantees to allocateresources to foundational research anddesign through contracting mechanismsthat require it periodically. A commonbehavior of grantees who build technologicaltools is to recognize the importance ofuser research, but prioritize other technicaltasks. It is critical for rigorous user researchto precede and inform tool design, anddonors can stage-gate support to promptthese activities.Encourage grantees working on earlyprototypes or nascent ideas to defineand test their use-cases before toolsare fully built. Risk aversion often leadsdonors toward grantees who are comfortablein demonstrating the functionality oftheir tool. While these potential granteesmay make the most convincing pitch, theymay also be too far into development tointegrate new lessons about users or specificuse-cases. Early designs and open questionsdon’t necessarily mean high risk. Instead,donors can see them as opportunities toreduce medium- and long-term risk byusing design research to determine preciseuse cases.2. Encourage systematic, scalableapproaches to learning about usersGovernance data initiatives often identifyand learn about users through passive,ad-hoc methods. Some limit their scopeof inquiry to a subset of presumed users.Many rely on feedback mechanisms thatare informal and therefore difficult tostrengthen or scale. In this way, initiativeswill continue to understand data usethrough a narrow and potentiallymisleading lens. To support broaderthinking and new practices, donors can:Encourage grantees to conductfoundational research and development(R&D). The social sector oftenexpects foundational R&D to be completedby the time a group is seeking funding. Thefunding models for many social organizationsthen makes it difficult for them toinvest in strong R&D; as such, proposalsare often filled with untested assumptions.Once funded, grantees are then expectedto execute against their proposal and oftenlack the incentives, resources, and processesto look beyond or pursue alternativesto their early thinking. (By contrast, theprivate sector tends to make significantinvestments in R&D at the start of aproduct’s development process, and thencontinuously over its lifecycle.) Donorscan fund early and deep R&D work toensure initiatives are grounded in (andexecuting against) an empiricallyderived understanding of users.Help grantees select and sequenceresearch, design, and testingapproaches, and ensure they arebeing deployed under a cohesivestrategy. Qualitative, macro-view research(e.g. focused on the landscape in which theintervention will operate) is most useful atthe start of a project to assess opportunitiesand set direction. It can also be usedto refresh or redirect strategy. Conversely,quantitative, micro-view research (e.g.focused on the mechanisms of and10
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Page 3 and 4: DefinitionsAcknowledgmentsReboot is
Page 5 and 6: TOWARD A MORENUANCED APPROACH TOGOV
Page 7 and 8: Challenge Two: Governance ecosystem
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Page 13 and 14: Encourage interactions & coalitions
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Using Data to Influence Government Decisions

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