E&C+need+assessment+concept+note

Concept: Engagement and collaboration needs assessment


 * Background **

ILRI teams are working in complex contexts where research for development is supposed to lead to concrete development outcomes. This way of working increasingly calls upon partnership development, engagement within and without the institute to mobilize ideas, capacities and energies. Engagement and collaboration are potentially essential elements that modern day researchers need to understand and use in order to reach the development outcomes that they are promising to deliver on. To assist ILRI’s research teams, CKM aims to provide an enabling environment for research collaboration online and offline.

To ensure future engagement and collaboration service packages are demand led, CKM is conducting a baseline study to document the state of engagement and collaboration at ILRI and its partners. The study aims to identify needs and to compare the current situation with best practices and current trends in research collaboration. The resulting gap analysis will inform strategic recommendations for the services offered by the CKM team. Furthermore, having a baseline will allow us to show progress and document change. The study will build on previous work done to identify business processes where collaboration tools can add value.

The baseline study aims to assess engagement and collaboration approaches and tools already in use and to identify unmet needs as well as challenges and opportunities. The objectives of the study are to:
 * Objectives **
 * Understand what ILRI teams mean by engagement and collaboration and what it entails.
 * Collect baseline data about engagement and collaboration activities and approaches they are undertaking and platforms they are already using.
 * Identify needs and opportunities for improvement as well as challenges.
 * Identify best practices and current trends in research collaboration.
 * Suggest ways forward to build upon these potential improvements and inform a campaign.

The main questions the study wants to answer are:
 * Questions **
 * How do ILRI teams, projects and programs engage and collaborate internally and externally with partners and donors?
 * What challenges do they face?
 * What needs regarding engagement and collaboration do they have?
 * What services can CKM provide to answer those needs?

**Scope** Discovery of existing approaches: The E&C campaign will make use of three approaches:
 * Identify key informants and conduct interviews
 * Identify focus groups and conduct focus groups interview
 * Map methods, tools and approaches already used for engagement and collaboration by ILRI teams
 * Approach **
 * Conduct key informant interviews
 * Conduct a survey on current engagement and collaboration practices to all ILRI scientific teams, focusing on the direct value for teams
 * Follow-up focus group discussion (or key informant interview with the team leader and any comms person) to discuss initial findings about their team and discuss potential needs, challenges and opportunities
 * Internal debriefing among E&C staff to identify key opportunities
 * Feedback presentation of the findings and debriefing with each team (at least each team leader) to discuss how to move forward with this, to suggest or provide methods / approaches or tools which support the teams to better engage and collaborate internally with their teams and externally with partners.


 * Methods **
 * ** Online survey  **
 * Online survey questions: survey questions will be created in surveymonkey and sent to selected teams to assess their needs.


 * ** Focus group interviews  **
 * Initially the leaders of three teams will be interviewed. For these interviews a conversation guide should be developed to aid unstructured, open-ended discussion. Following leaders interview, the wider group for selected teams will be interviewed.


 * ** Analytics  **
 * It would be practical to show the survey results with usage data from existing tools and social networks. These could include: Wikis, Yammer, Wordpress. Usage data to gather across the platforms could be: No of users, No of posts/documents shared, No of comments, etc.

** Targeting the campaign ** ** Introducing the campaign **
 * ** Gap analysis  **
 * By comparing the status quo of engagement and collaboration of ILRI’s research teams and their partners with best practices and trends in research collaboration, gaps will be identified. Based on these gaps recommendations for further action will be made. These recommendations could take the form of use cases that will inform a grounded strategy for research collaboration and engagement.
 * Not all teams are starting from the same point. For the sake of testing this campaign and understanding how useful it is, three teams will be targeted: e.g. ILRI-ASSP, BioSciences-ILVA and Gene bank/ ?
 * If the campaign proves useful, it could be expanded, in 2016, to other teams and perhaps include a wider scope than strictly engagement and collaboration.
 * A great strategy is to immediately write a post to announce the campaign context to people. The post should introduce the goals of the campaign, how it fits into ILRI’s themes and projects and the plan for achieving those goals.
 * Spread the announcement as internal marketing on coffee morning, ilri-announcements and Maarifa blog.
 * Using video for internal marketing – why is it important? Using testimonies from project like Africa RISING.


 * Timeline **
 * Finalize the campaign concept note || 5 December2015 ||
 * Finalize and send the surveyand invitations for FGD || 10December 2015 ||
 * Key informant interviews || 14-21 December2015? ||
 * Organize focus group discussions || 21January 2016 ||
 * Analyze results and tease out CKM opportunities || 31 January 2016 ||
 * Organize debriefings with team || 15 February 2016 ||