Case Studies
Below is a sampling of recent work with trusted partners and clients.
Development work is challenging, and often times the road is full of constraints, surprises, and some victories. Our case studies are not merely success stories. They’re also honest stories of learning, hard work, and collaboration. We aim to inspire and foster ideas on how to continue moving forward.
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Getting 9,000 People on Boardwith Change
An organization-wide initiative to help technical teams better communicate their findings to external audiences.
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InspiringChange for Girls
A theory of change to drive impact for girls that makes a clear link between girls’ agency and behavior change.
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Boiling Down a Foundation’s Safe Water Strategy: Communication tools and plans to help the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation capture and share its grantmaking approach
What will it take to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6.1 — universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all—by 2030? For more than 30 years, the Hilton Foundation has funded efforts to help answer this question. The Foundation wanted to share its Safe Water Initiative’s approach, results, and lessons learned with peer donors to leverage insights and accelerate progress. Databoom used design thinking to focus on the information that peer donors would value most. We combined rigorous qualitative and quantitative analysis with thoughtful design to produce three country profiles that are evidence-based, accurate, and honest. We also introduced a planning tool to maximize stakeholder engagement.
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ChildFund: Measuring the Road to 100M
ChildFund International works with children living in poverty to increase their capacity and improve their lives through health, nutrition, early childhood development, education, youth empowerment, and economic strengthening. Additionally, ChildFund places great importance on child protection, which is integrated into all of these sectors. As part of its new strategic plan, ChildFund aims to quadruple the organization’s annual reach from 25 million to 100 million children and families. Databoom has been working with ChildFund to scale an M&E framework and set of methods that will monitor the contribution of policy and budget advocacy to the organization’s overall reach and impact goals. Final products include a theory of change that articulates the organization’s work through advocacy, logic models piloted at the country level to align campaign-level efforts to the theory of change, scorecards for data capture, and an M&E Framework to track and monitor ChildFund’s progress through advocacy.
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Using Digital Dashboards to Strengthen a Media Movement: The Experience of MTV Staying Alive Foundation
A digitized data management tool to strengthen evidence-based decision-making at the MTV Staying Alive Foundation.
The MTV Staying Alive Foundation (MTV-SAF) creates groundbreaking content to improve young people’s health and reaches audiences in more than 72 countries. The team at MTV-SAF has always believed in using evidence to inform content and evaluate progress, but evidence wasn’t centralized and there was no way to seamlessly bring data together.
Databoom partnered with Visualst and MTV-SAF to create a user-friendly data management system to empower MTV-SAF’s data-based decision-making. The final product enables MTV-SAF to think differently about engaging audiences, communicating evidence, and monitoring and evaluation.
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Going Global with Health Exemplars
A partnership strategy based on design thinking.
Exemplars in Global Health showcases countries that have made exceptional progress addressing major health issues like stunting and under-five mortality, along with emerging issues such as COVID-19. The goal is to help global health decision-makers apply insights from countries with positive outlier performance on health outcomes and service delivery – “Exemplars”— to improve global health policy and practice decisions. As part of that effort, Exemplars developed an interactive database and online and offline support tools and was preparing to launch its suite of tools globally in 2020. To support this launch, Exemplars needed to increase its business intelligence to plan and execute a partnership strategy.
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Handing the Evidence Keys over to Market Planning Teams
An easy-to-use tool for marketers to compare market performance across countries and adapt programs.
While PSI was addressing global demand for family planning and modern contraception, they had a growing demand challenge of their own. The Program Analytics team found themselves as the gatekeeper to essential data and needed a way to share with teams, country offices and others beyond PSI in a format that was user-friendly.
Databoom then partnered with Visualst, a public-interest data design firm, to convert the large set of survey data on use/need and analysis tables into an easy-to-use tool. The objective was to let users interface only with the data they need and make it easier to digest and share results.
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Inspiring Change for Girls
A theory of change to drive impact for girls.
Girl Effect builds youth brands and mobile platforms to empower girls to change their lives. Girl Effect needed to articulate a strategy that donors could understand and the development community would support. Databoom worked with Girl Effect to articulate a theory of change that makes a clear link between girls’ agency and behavior change. We also worked with teams across the organization to disseminate and operationalize the theory of change.
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Capturing and Communicating a Legacy
A communications strategy to ensure the E2A Project’s legacy will live on through the family planning community.
Evidence to Action for Strengthened Family Planning and Reproductive Health Services for Women and Girls (E2A) is USAID’s global flagship project for strengthening quality family planning and reproductive health service delivery. The project will end in 2019, and during its last two years, E2A wants to ensure that its legacy will live on through the global family planning community. Databoom synthesized seven years of complex work into four legacy themes and created a communication strategy to fortify the project’s posterity.
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Can All (Condom) Boats Rise Even in an Economic Crisis?
An experimental study to test the impact of social marketing on Zimbabwe’s condom market.
Zimbabwe has one of the strongest condom programs in Africa and, over time, the government and international donors have made significant investments in condoms to prevent the spread of HIV. By 2016, the future of condom funding was uncertain. International donors were questioning their investments and were focused on creating a self-sustaining condom market. Removing financial support could mean condom insecurity and losing gains made in HIV/AIDS prevention through condom programming. We tested the hypothesis that the right investments in condom social marketing could help “all boats rise” and improve the market for condoms. The study provided evidence that donors and decision-makers could use to inform further investments in Zimbabwe and other condom markets.
