ForSet Trains Rustavi City and ServiceLab Employees

Credit: ForSet, May 1, 2018

Communications is not easy. Imagine having to tell a country what your government agency or international organization is or is not doing, why it is the right choice, and convincing everyone that it is the right choice. It is not an easy task. Now imagine trying to add data into the communications as a means to help tell the story. How do you find data to help tell your story? How do you analyze the data? How do you include the data in your communications so it is persuasive, but does not trigger the fear that people have about numbers and math. Using data in communications can be very powerful, but it requires skill and practice.

This is what the team at ForSet has been doing for many years. First we started telling our own stories with data and had many successes and failures along the way. We then expanded our role to teaching other people so that they could learn from our mistakes and jump directly to creating great stories and campaigns that are based on data. We have taught country and regional media organizations along with local and international NGOs on how to use data in communications, but we have never had the chance to work with a governmental agency before. Well, not until a recent project with UNDP Georgia gave us the opportunity.

ForSet recently completed a project with Rustavi City, ServiceLab, and UNDP Georgia where we were tasked with building the capacity of 12 Rustavi City and 3 ServiceLab employees in the areas of data collection, data analysis and data communications. Over the course of this project we taught them the following topics over 6 sessions:

• How and where to collect data

• Data analysis with spreadsheets

• Data visualization techniques

• Design fundamentals

• Planning campaigns for social media

At the beginning of the project, most of the participants had a very basic understanding of spreadsheets, but after 3 sessions most of them had a high intermediate level of understanding. We accomplished this by incorporating real datasets about Rustavi into the lessons to keep their interests and by giving them plenty of time to practice, practice, practice. By the end of the project they were able to use functions, build custom equations, and use pivot tables to create summaries of data.

One surprising occurrence was their desire to learn scraping. Scraping is a way to collect data from a web page and save it to a spreadsheet and it was mentioned during the data collection lesson. They immediately asked for details on how to create a scraper and we provided a scraper lesson during a later session. They were so excited to be able to collect data from a web page, save it to a spreadsheet and then be able to analyze the data. Scraping was not a subject that we had taught before but we are glad that we did because it gave the participants another tool for collecting data.

Overall, the experience of working with government employees was positive and we can see a place for more collaborations like this in the future. Both NGOs and governments have skills and knowledge that would be extremely valuable to each other and there should be more opportunities for the transferring of these skills. We are grateful for UNDP Georgia including ForSet in this experience and we hope they and other organizations and donors consider more projects like this in the future. ForSet is currently looking for funding to create a fellowship program for government employees so if anyone is interested in helping fund this, please contact us!

https://medium.com/@ForSet/forset-trains-rustavi-city-and-servicelab-employees-83a7149b929c