Empowering communities through high quality, representative data

IDinsight’s DataDelta approach, formerly Data on Demand, has always been grounded on a simple conviction – it should be faster and easier to collect data directly from people, and to use data about people to improve their lives. 

Household surveys are a critical source of data for understanding the conditions, experiences, and aspirations of families. Governments and social sector organizations use data from household surveys to inform program design, targeting, service delivery, budget allocations, and more. By making household surveys faster and more cost-effective, the DataDelta approach gives families a voice – through data – in the policies and programs that affect their lives.

With thanks to Co-Impact and the Gates Foundation, IDinsight has invested in making primary data collection faster, easier, and more cost-effective, and in bringing these capacities to new countries. Born in India, DataDelta surveys have now represented over 500 million people in India, Kenya, and the Philippines – bringing their experiences directly to decision-makers for programs in health, education, women’s economic empowerment, disaster resilience, and more. 

After a dedicated period of innovation and geographic expansion, we are stepping back to celebrate what we’ve achieved, reflect on what we’ve learned, and share our innovations with all of you. As I look back on our work together, five big stories come through.

1. Data really can improve lives.

Collecting primary data from families is hard work. Our field managers can attest to this! It is really gratifying to see that hard work pay off in new insights about vulnerable families and new directions for the programs that serve them. In one Indian state, our work helped dramatically increase access to prenatal care for women. In the Philippines, DataDelta survey findings are shaping public health campaigns and the rollout of Universal Health Care. In Kenya, we’re helping county officials make smarter decisions about health services for adolescents. Check out our DataDelta projects to learn more.

2. Great data drives more than surveys.

The DataDelta Approach started with a focus on large-scale surveys (and yes, we have done some very large-scale surveys!), but it has become much more. Once you build the muscles and systems to collect data from 50,000 households, or across an archipelago of 7000 islands, you can use them to power other services. Check out DataDelta in Action to see how we are using the muscles we built with DataDelta to make AI more inclusive, to advance gender equity, strengthen health systems, build a plug-and-play platform for quick access to a representative sample of households in India, and help partners improve the quality of their own monitoring or administrative data. Data also drives other work IDinsight does with partners, like impact and process evaluations. So we are integrating lessons and tools from the DataDelta Approach into data collection across IDinsight.

3. Cost-effectiveness motivates all our innovation.

We set out to make it faster, easier, and more cost-effective to collect high-quality data from people. This conviction to strike a good balance between quality, cost, and time has driven all of our innovation. It has driven our testing of sampling approaches that ensure representation at lower cost than traditional methods. It is the driving force behind SurveyStream, our custom-built survey management software. It motivated our deep dive into our own costs to find hidden sources of big budgets. For example, we found that teams were spending too much time and money on questionnaire development so we created Survey Accelerator in response. In addition, we realized some of our data quality approaches were duplicative, so we did a better job optimizing across quality and cost. We are pleased to share these innovations with you so they can motivate and power your work as well.

4. Discerning data quality can be difficult for partners.

Everyone is discerning about cost. It is easy for partners and funders to question us on our budgets, but there is often less clarity or emphasis on scrutinizing data quality. So we have to draw our own lines. For example, check out this post about the quality sacrifices we just won’t make to save money, and this post about what our Philippines team has learned about the cost/quality tradeoffs among in-person, SMS and IVR surveys. We focus on technical data quality and excellent field practices to protect the integrity and truth of what respondents say, so that their truth accurately informs policies and programs that affect their lives. Check out our work on data quality optimization.

5. Innovation comes from people.

We’ve learned that you get the best ideas when you build multi-disciplinary and multi-level teams. Then you give everyone agency, voice, and exposure to each other’s work. Some of our best software solutions come from field managers, and from our data engineering team spending time in the field. Our sampling innovations are designed and tested with statisticians, field managers, and associates. The wind in the sails of innovation is flexible funding. We are so grateful to Co-Impact, and the Gates Foundation before it, for giving us the agency to try new things, follow the learning and smarts of our great teams, and go places we never imagined.

As we close out this dedicated phase of DataDelta’s innovation and growth, the work is far from over. The ideas, tools, and practices developed during this period are continuing to shape how we work across IDinsight – from data collection methods to service design to how we center respondent voices in program and policy decisions. You’ll see DataDelta’s influence in action as we integrate these innovations into core projects, launch new ones, and support partners in making more data-driven, cost-effective decisions. Most importantly, we hope you’ll keep using and evolving these lessons, so that the impact of this work continues to grow, long beyond the life of any one grant.