In this article, we outline the various areas, from our experience, that remote surveying and data collection enhances the efforts of international development organizations, governments, local NGOs, and other partners. Click on the headings to learn more about our work, use cases, and methodologies.

Data for Humanitarian Aid and Relief

When Cyclone Idai hit Mozambique, it was difficult for aid groups to know immediate needs and areas they needed to focus on. During various Ebola outbreaks and West and Central Africa, it was also impossible to access affected areas due to lockdowns and the disease’s contagious nature. In both cases, and many more incidences of natural disaster, conflict, and disease when affected populations are cut off from the rest of the world, GeoPoll has deployed our unique remote data collection and messaging capabilities to collect on the ground data that helped aid organizations, governments and rescuers act decisively to save lives and property.  

Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning

Donors, NGOs, and governments often need to assess the effectiveness of their programs and interventions and communicate their successes. Using remote mobile surveys, such organizations can measure project processes, demonstrate community attitudes and perceptions over time, and track the outcomes of project interventions more effectively on the ground for better and timely decision-making.

Food Security and Agricultural Production

In many of the emerging markets, food security is usually a significant concern. Over the years, GeoPoll has worked with tens of development organizations to remotely track multiple types of food security data such as food prices, market operability status, crop harvest data, and frequency of meal consumption, both for emergency assessments, ongoing monitoring, and one-off analyses of specific areas or populations.

Health & Nutrition Data

Using remote on-the-ground data, organizations can monitor and improve health systems. For example, when COVID-19 struck in 2020, health and humanitarian organizations worked with GeoPoll to understand the impact on health and health systems in emerging nations. We have also helped gather sensitive health information that would have been difficult with face-to-face research.

Democracy & Governance

GeoPoll’s mobile research and engagement platform allows governments and democracy groups to reach citizens in remote areas or conflict zones quickly and safely. Organizations can administer remote surveys and educational messages to extremely specific target populations, giving them the ability to assess situations and act upon the most up-to-date information quickly. This can be useful in monitoring government services, assessing the political climate, promoting transparency such as by tracking corruption incidence, monitoring security situations, and more.

Financial Inclusion

One of the most integral steps to developing financial inclusion frameworks is gathering realities and the opinions of banked and unbanked populations. That way, organizations can track financial inclusion rates, evaluate access to financial services, research financing gaps, and track growing trends such as usage of mobile money, mobile loan usage, and more. Over time, GeoPoll has perfected its remote mobile surveying capabilities to enable financial stakeholders to gather ongoing data to measure trends or gather one-off data from specific populations on their financial needs.

Energy, Climate & Environment

Climate Change is one of the hottest topics of the Century. As the globe brainstorms ways to combat the climate and environmental degradation, it is crucial to understand the changes happening in all areas, even the remotest, how that affects essential aspects such as food security and resilience, and grassroots opinions on the course of action.

Education & Employment

In tracking education and employment changes and improvements over time, remote surveying helps gather direct feedback on education and employment from communities, teachers, students, and parents on key service delivery indicators, including absenteeism, textbook availability, student-teacher ratios, and school infrastructure. It also helps understand specific perceptions, behaviors, and knowledge to design campaigns that improve educational outcomes and obtain ongoing feedback on program interventions. Governments, the private sector and development organizations can also gather data on education levels and employment and link private sector, academic institutions, and job seekers.

GeoPoll’s International Development Research Work

GeoPoll regularly conducts international development research for United Nations agencies, NGOs, governments, humanitarian groups, and other stakeholders in the development and relief sectors. We help collect ongoing tracking data or one-time project-based data collection fast and affordably owing to our unique technology, robust database and direct integrations with mobile network operators that enable us to reach any population worldwide.

Learn more about GeoPoll’s international development and humanitarian work.

The post How Remote Surveys Enhance International Development & Aid appeared first on GeoPoll.

Since GeoPoll’s launch, we have grown to now facilitate research in over 60 countries, including 25 countries in Africa alone. During this time, GeoPoll’s team has amassed a trove of knowledge on best practices when carrying out international marketing research. We have also encountered some challenges, and with them, invaluable learnings regarding international research.
Based on these learnings, we have put together a how-to guide on the marketing research process , including tips on regional nuances to look out for as well as the dos and don’ts when engaging a research agency, and how to understand basic research terms and get the most value out of the data you are gathering. We hope you find this useful as you start your own marketing research process. If you have specific questions about embarking on a new project feel free to contact us.

Getting Started With Your Marketing Research Process

a. Conduct Preliminary Research

Carry out some preliminary research by going online and searching for existing survey reports on your topic of interest. There might not be much especially if you are looking for very specific information, but you might find something close either for a different country or a report that gives you some ideas on how to go about your primary research.

While gathering international research data has been difficult in the past, in the last 10 years, information about Africa and other regions is more available online. Governments, the private sector, and international development organisations throughout the world are continuously churning out research data. One example of this can be seen on GeoPoll’s very own blog, which contains troves of research reports on various topics on commercial and international development research. This secondary data can be used to help structure your research brief.

b. Develop a Research Brief

To get the most out of your marketing research project, put together a brief with the objectives of your data collection. What exactly do you want to understand better? Be as specific as possible, for example: “What percentage of adult working females aged between 25 and above living in urban areas use my product brand?”

Which aspects of the 4 Ps of marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion) do you want to best understand? The more detail you can provide the better. This helps later when designing the project.
A brief document should contain the following information: Company background, the business objectives, the research objectives, your target market, your competition, the geographical focus and your research project budget.

c. Identify the Right Marketing Research Agency

Research agencies come in all shapes and sizes. It often helps to understand an agency’s main data collection method which, more often than not, tells you what their strengths are. What you will note is that many of the international marketing research agencies have wide-ranging capabilities in data collection and use multiple data collection modes. However, often the cost for these agencies is higher than for agencies that only specialize in one data collection method. For you as the consumer, the scope of your project will determine which agency you will work with.

When talking to various research agencies, counter check their website and social media pages to look for any published reports online, which will give you an idea of the quality of their research and topic areas they focus in. Another crucial due diligence aspect of deciding on what agency to work with is their capabilities and country coverage – too many companies claim to be in markets that they are not in, and they end up sub-contracting. This practice means you are further removed from the data collection process and can also result in a higher cost.

You can verify the company’s coverage by requesting for a copy of their panel book; this is a comprehensive document that gives you details of the agency’s research panel and includes their geographical coverage as well as the demographic details of the panel. Also request copies of case studies, either of projects on the same topic or in the same geographical location, to further assess their past experience in the area you are interested in.

Last but not least, confirm that the agency is a member of either local, regional or international research accreditation bodies based on the geographical scope of your project. These associations have strict policies around marketing research ethics and how data is collected from respondents. GeoPoll is a proud corporate member of ESOMAR,  PAMRO, and MSRA.

d. Determine Your Data Collection Mode

Once you have listed your objectives, deciding on which of the following research methodologies to utilize becomes easier. Deciding on which type of research to run also helps further narrow down the agency best suited based on their capabilities. The data collection mode you use will impact both the type of data you collect and how it is collected.

Data is generally grouped into two categories, qualitative and quantitative. Simply put, qualitative data is unstructured and is often exploratory by nature. When analyzed, responses may be grouped into similar categories but they cannot be ranked in the same way quantitative data can.

Quantitative research is the mathematical approach to collecting data, which can more clearly be measured and structured. Quantitative data includes survey data where respondents have a clear choice of answers, and quantitative questions often appear with radio buttons, check boxes and Likert scales which are easy to measure and compare. The two data collection methods are often referred to as simply quant and qual. It is important to note that qualitative research tends to be more expensive than quantitative research, as it requires more manual data analysis.

Different research modes will often lend themselves more easily to quantitative or qualitative data collection. Focus groups, unstructured interviews, and open-ended questions are typically collecting qualitative data, while surveys with answer choices collect quantitative data. Understanding the different modes and what type of data they can collect is important: Text message surveys can collect some qualitative data, but perform better with quantitative questions that are easily answered from a list of choices.

You also need to consider how robust and agile the different modes of data collection are. Can your selected mode work across multiple countries and languages? How much data are you looking to collect and in what time-frame? The level of scalability of the mode is important, especially if your project will entail a multi-country survey. In addition, some modes will collect data more slowly than others.

Some examples of different modes of data collection include:
• Face-to-face
• Text message (SMS) survey
• Online survey
• Mobile web survey
• Mobile application survey or passive data collection
• CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews)
• CAPI (Computer Assisted Personal Interview)
• Focus groups

Marketing research agencies can often give you guidance on what modes would be best for your project, and you should also consider if the agency has experience in that type of data collection. Another question to consider is how relevant each methodology is to your needs – if you are looking for a lot of exploratory data, a focus group may be your best bet, but if you want to reach a wide group of respondents in emerging areas, text message surveys would be a better mode.

e. Conduct Data Analysis

The most important aspect of market research is being able to analyze the data once it has been collected. A thorough analysis should guide you on how to act on the insights you have gathered. It is therefore crucial that the research agency, through their insights report, address the questions you had set out at the start of your survey. For example: What is my product’s current position in the market, who are my actual customers, and which aspects of my 4 Ps do I need to work on? Analysis capabilities of the agency and the tools being used by the analysts and if they meet your needs

f. Complete A Post Project Review

Having a session with the research team after completion of your project to share feedback and discuss the project execution is sometimes overlooked. Such an undertaking involves various departments but is important to understand why a project did or did not go as smoothly as planned. A post-project review session helps in both parties knowing what areas worked and which ones the agency or the client will need to improve for their next project.

In summary

Conducting international marketing research is often a large undertaking and there are various details you need to consider before embarking on your project. Language, infrastructure, internet penetration, and the type of data you are looking to collect all have an impact on your project and how easily data will be collected from your target population. To be successful, you must engage the right company: One that has a wide range of experience in the area you are researching can utilize multiple modes with ease and can give you advice on questionnaire design, regional nuances, and more.

GeoPoll has a team of experts in collecting data around the globe, and specifically in emerging markets in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. We are always happy to advise you on your data collection needs: To ask a question or contact us about an upcoming project, please get in touch with us 

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