Frankline: To start us off, please tell me about your background before you came to GeoPoll.

Ricardo Lopes: Before Joining GeoPoll, I was in the media industry both at agency and publisher. I was involved in strategy development, which gave me a firm grasp of using multiple data sources to make informed planning decisions on spending, targeting, channel selection, and managing cross-country teams and global clients.

What drew you to join GeoPoll? 

Emerging markets pose a challenge when it comes to acquiring actionable data that businesses desperately need, not to mention expensive and time-consuming. So, when I heard about GeoPoll, its integration with telco customer bases, and the technology it had built to incorporate mobile-based data gathering methods for market research purposes at a scale, I was very interested.

After joining the team is when I realized that was just the tip of the iceberg. I was intrigued by the vast array of clients our products and services are positioned to, all powered by mobile.

How long ago was that, and what changes have you observed since joining GeoPoll?

I have been in GeoPoll for four years – I joined as a Business Development Manager in 2019.

The one key defining factor of GeoPoll’s culture is adaptability, a trait we inherited from our earlier startup days. I have seen this company react to client needs, adapt to changing environmental factors, and accommodate an explosion of growth in a fast, decisive manner. Being a rapidly growing company with growing skills and talents, I am excited about observing my colleagues and learning from them in this ever-changing company.

Can you briefly describe your role at GeoPoll and your main responsibilities? 

I manage the Southern African Region both from a client and team perspective. We work collectively as a unit to develop client relationships, implement projects, and ensure the region’s overall success.

As a Regional Director, what excites you most about your work at GeoPoll? 

The clients. They come from various sectors and countries, which makes for exciting work. Not many people get to start their day talking to a community-based radio station in Mozambique and end their day discussing a project with a mining consortium in London. No day is the same, which can be challenging at times but provides me the constant change needed to stay motivated in my role.

With the wide array of clients comes the diverse research challenges to be addressed. It is exciting having a birds-eye view on feedback gained from such a wide-ranging respondent profile. Often, I watch or read the news about an obscure product or demographic and say, “I have done research on that.”

Where do you think Market Research in Africa is headed in the next five years?

Difficult question, our focus is always on research applications that are born out of new technology. Take, for instance, the predicted surge in popularity of voice assistants allowing the capture of 125 words per minute in a conversation. The potential is that new research channels are likely to open up and enable researchers to gain more insights quicker than currently done, with more in-depth and rich qualitative answers.

A good gauge of where things are heading is looking towards what the global clients are asking for. When all the buzzwords are removed, they are all asking for the same thing – in moment or agile research. The power of this feedback being close to the decision-making process is attractive to insights managers but poses a challenge to market researchers. We must focus on cutting down on research times to short bursts of focused research for speed and flexibility of research experiences. It is not only in the fieldwork process but in the auxiliary services such as design and analysis. AI will play a massive role in this regard, although I believe it is still a bit early to automate the research process fully.

All in all, I believe it will be more of the same. We will see our CAWI capabilities increase with the rise of mobile internet penetration on the continent.

What has surprised you about GeoPoll and the projects we work on?

The speed at which we can deploy and field projects always leaves me a bit surprised. I am further impressed by the vast array of data collection solutions we have at our disposal in case of challenges during project implementation.

Do you have a favorite project or experience at GeoPoll you would like to share?

During my onboarding in Nairobi, a colleague invited me to tag along for a series of qualitative focus groups run for Colgate in Kajiado, where we were interviewing members of a Maasai tribe. Halfway through the day, we were lagging due to the large distance needed to walk between locations, and our international clients were starting to take strain under the harsh conditions. As an experienced motorcycle rider, I rented a bike from someone in the community and proceeded to transport clients, moderators, and GeoPoll staff between interviewing locations. This not only made our clients happy but gave me a unique opportunity to experience the landscape from a perspective not many tourists can have.

I became somewhat of a celebrity mzungu among the locals and was welcomed into a village. All of this culminated in a marriage proposal from a local girl whose family offered me ten cows as a dowry. This is how I got my earlier nickname in the company “10 COWS”. A top experience not only at my time at GeoPoll but in my entire life.

What is a fact about yourself that people may not know right away? 

I am very transparent, so it does not take long to find out what I am about. Quick unknown fact, I paid my way through university playing Poker.

What do you like to do outside of work? 

South Africa has fantastic nightlife. However, COVID-19 and being a new dad has changed that for me. I enjoy the outdoors, and growing up in a surfing mad family, I take surf trips down to the coast as often as I can. Living inland, I enjoy downhill mountain biking and hunting.

Finally, what does it take to succeed in your line of work?

Being competitive is paramount to success in my role. It is essential to be driven and have the proverbial thick skin in business development. If I had to look at GeoPoll specifically, it is important to be “change fit” and be willing to redesign old paradigms and ways of working drastically and often even if you do not agree with them. This has taught me to trust our leaders, which always results in a learning experience, good or bad.

The post Ricardo Lopes on the Future of Research appeared first on GeoPoll.

Lucy Wanyee Interview

Frankline: What were you doing before joining GeoPoll, and what drew you to join the team? 

Lucy Wanyee: My educational background is in mathematical and statistical risk management. Before joining GeoPoll, I worked for an NGO and my main tasks revolved around desk and field research to help finalize the organization’s end products. Before joining the NGO, I was in the banking industry. For people who know me, I am very good with money management. ????

I had previously worked at a research company where we sent teams to the field with paper questionnaires. You know how research is conducted traditionally. Then I heard about GeoPoll and how the company was remotely conducting research. I was interested in being part of a company that could collect the data needed in a shorter time at the comfort of one’s desk!

How long have you been at GeoPoll? How has the company grown since you joined? 

I do not think about this a lot, but in just the blink of an eye, six years have gone by! GeoPoll is an ever-evolving company, and with the dynamism, so many new things happen as we cater to the different needs of diverse types of clients.

Overall, there have been significant, incremental changes and innovations that the company has made in data collection methodologies that assure quality, especially in hard-to-reach areas. I am happy to be part of the team at GeoPoll that designs and implements these changes – we seem to find solutions for any challenge! Also, I was among the first few employees in Kenya, and I have seen the team grow tremendously over time.

Can you briefly describe your role at GeoPoll and your primary responsibilities?  

As an Operations Manager, I oversee the daily operations of the in-house GeoPoll Audience Measurement (GAM) product and some of the other On-Demand projects (custom research projects for clients). My main tasks involve ensuring the client objectives are met by overseeing that proper quality checks of surveys are done before they are run.

Due to COVID-19 and the ensuing market changes, I have also been playing a hybrid role that involves project implementation of CATI and CAPI projects in various markets. This role involves training the local teams that implement the projects in the different markets and coordinating with internal and external teams to ensure that things are flowing seamlessly for the end goal to be met.

As Operations Manager, what excites you most about your work at GeoPoll?  

Every single day has a lesson attached to it. From the various projects we run to the systems we use. The most exciting thing for me is to see the actual representation of “no one cloth fits all.” People all over the world are interested in different things. One client’s needs are incredibly different from the other, and just watching that unfold in implementation wows me every single time.

It is an adventure for me, the number of gears that move together to achieve diverse needs, and I get elated every time we deliver the client’s data.

What do the various sections you manage do? 

I work directly with different teams that do different things. We ensure that surveys are quality checked before moving into the field, release surveys into the field, and monitor their performance. We also play a big part in monitoring the costs we spend on running surveys and helping test the performance of any new markets we launch in.

Most recently, we have also played a big part in local team training and project implementation for various multi-national projects.

What are you excited about in terms of where GeoPoll will go in the future?  

Apart from the enthusiasm of seeing data collection modes and technologies evolve, I am excited about the type of clients and projects coming our way that keep the job exciting. Sometimes I think a particular feature we release is perfect until I see it develop and morph into a very different capability that I would not have imagined at the start. I am eager to see what the next years bring.

Another thing is how the team is growing. As needs keep evolving, the company keeps growing, and I get to work with many different types of professionals. I am keen on seeing how the team will grow in various roles within the company.

What is a fact about yourself that people may not know right away? 

Not many people know that I am very shy. But I have learned that you do not have to be bold to play the part, just jump into the deep end from time to time.

No way! What do you like to do outside of work? 

You may have seen me mobilize people in the company to give for community causes. I enjoy visiting and spending time with the less fortunate in society and giving back to the community. Other times, I am either cooking or traveling.

The post Lucy Wanyee on adapting research to evolving needs appeared first on GeoPoll.

Can you give our readers a bit of an explanation about you and your background?

Yes, of course. So, my background is in research and global health — that is what I studied in school. Since grad school, I have been focused on the monitoring aspect in the monitoring and evaluation world — specifically for projects in Southern and Eastern Africa. Overall though, I am passionate about leveraging mobile technologies for rigorous data collection in low- and middle-income countries, and about reaching people, and reaching them quickly, that we may otherwise not reach in door-to-door surveys.

As someone that has been involved in mHealth for years now, how would you define mHealth as a term?

The way I think about mHealth is really about leveraging mobile technologies to improve health and increase health-seeking behaviors. mHealth is really just where mobile technology and global health intersect. mHealth efforts may include data collection for monitoring or research purpose, but also, for example, the development of mobile applications for healthcare providers that guide patient care. I’ve worked extensively with both mobile data collection, but also mobile tools that help frontline workers deliver care. mHealth is a big world and many initiatives or programs that take advantage of mobile technology would also fall into the mHealth category in my eyes.

So, considering your definition of mHealth, how do you see mHealth’s role in supporting the response to the COVID-19 pandemic?

Good question. So, the coronavirus pandemic is a great example of why mobile research methods are a powerful tool for development and crisis management. As the pandemic has continued over the past six months there have been countless issues in which mobile research could have been, and was, used to aid in the response. Back in March and April, for example, misinformation on the virus was prominent; when it was neither feasible nor safe to send enumerators door to door, mobile research was used to investigate questions like, what are people hearing about COVID-19? What do people believe is the best way to keep themselves safe during the pandemic? Do people need more education before they will quarantine? Are people quarantining enough now? Etc.

It is essential for program managers handling crisis response to have actionable data that can answer these types of questions for them to course-correct their approaches and implement the most effective initiatives possible. Managers need data to inform decision making.

I absolutely agree. GeoPoll actually collected data in sub-Saharan Africa during that time and we were able to answer similar questions to those you listed. A lot of development professionals used the data we gathered to inform their initiatives actually! We released it for free on our website and the Humanitarian Data Exchange.

Yes, GeoPoll does a great job collecting rigorous data via remote and mobile modes. That is actually how I found out about GeoPoll in the first place. When I was working at Johns Hopkins, my team hired GeoPoll to conduct a mHealth survey for us. I think it was in 2014? It was during an Ebola outbreak in Liberia, but our work with GeoPoll went really smoothly.

I enjoyed working with GeoPoll staff and the data came back cleaned, coded, and ready for analysis in just a few days—which was amazing. Having that data back within a few days was essential for us to be able to guide our colleagues on-the-ground in Liberia on what needed to be adjusted about our approach for providing aid during the crisis.

Wow, I didn’t realize you were once a client of ours! If you don’t mind me asking, what influenced your team’s decision to hire us rather than another research provider?

Well, GeoPoll was the only mobile research provider with rigorous methodology I could find that provided a way a timely way to achieve responses from a sample that was proportionate to the national statistics for age, sex, and location. This meant that GeoPoll could produce a sample that would reflect the mobile-owning population, which is incredibly important for getting an accurate view on what is happening on the ground.

As a researcher, the rigor of methodology is paramount, always, but the speed in which the data could be returned was also important because the Ebola outbreak was a rapidly evolving situation and time was of the essence.

Yes, methodology is very important, but the speed of data output is as well in this line of work. So, would you say your experience as a GeoPoll client influenced your decision to join our team a few months ago?

Yes, it did. I have been interested in GeoPoll since I worked with the team years ago. Mainly because the experience made me believe in GeoPoll’s research process and I knew from personal experience how valuable the research GeoPoll collects is to initiatives throughout the world. When the role I am in now opened, I thought it could be a really great fit – mixing my background in global health, monitoring, and mHealth with GeoPoll’s commitment to quality survey research.

The post mHealth Perspectives from an Expert: Amanda Berman Interview Highlights appeared first on GeoPoll.