Toggle Menu

Community Advocacy through Data Visualization

Excella partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a project to help build community advocacy through data visualization in the form of an online data dashboard. This Data Triangulation for Advocacy Public-Private Partnership was funded by the CDC through the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and administered by Cardno International Development as part of the P4 project.

The CDC’s community scorecard is a social accountability tool for service providers to deliver quality services. This tool is used for assessment, planning, and monitoring of health services in multiple countries. It is usually a platform to hold duty-bearers accountable over the commitments they have made. This project’s goal was to take the data submitted for the different health centers community scorecards and have it compiled in one place for increased accountability, transparency, and visibility for better decision-making to support advocacy actions and changes to improve the quality of health services.

In the past, collecting data for the Scorecard has been hectic. The process was manual, which created challenges with collecting data, visualizing the data, and reporting. Completing a scorecard could take up to three months to have all the data put together, analyzed, and reported, making the information less timely than preferred.

Working together, Excella and the CDC aimed to visualize data from local Community Scorecards and PEPFAR program achievements in the form of a user-friendly dashboard to see how various advocacy items and actions that have been taken by CSOs could impact PEPFAR outcomes.

Having this information in dashboard form will help community organizations analyze trends in different scorecard indicators and view the advocacy impact not only at individual health centers but across other community centers. This tool allows organizations to identify where they can learn from each other by seeing what actions have been taken at other facilities on specific indicator issues, such as HIV/AID Counseling and Testing, Reproductive health, and more. By adding visibility to the impact of their advocacy actions, communities can see where another health facility may be having a similar issue and a similarly low score on the same measure. They can look on the dashboard to identify what specific advocacy action the health center took to make that service more available.

The CDC aims to use this dashboard in other locations doing community lead monitoring to add additional visibility into the advocacy impact of their work.

Watch to see how Excella and the CDC went about creating, testing, and iterating on this dashboard in Uganda with local users and CSOs. Afterward, learn how you can download this dashboard and adapt it for your purposes if you have a similar need to track trends over time and make comparisons on something similar to a Community Scorecard.

You Might Also Like

Excellian Spotlights

Excella Innovators: Leslie Welch

Leslie Welch is a Data Visualization Lead Developer and Co-Leader of our Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Ambassador (IDEA) Team. For our January Innovators Spotlight, we spoke...

Modern Analytics

5 Ways Data Analysts Can Transform Your Organization

Leading organizations realize how critical it is to prioritize data-informed decision-making. When quality data work...

Modern Analytics

Truck Safety Coalition Uses Data to Push for Safer Roads

Did you know that there were 4,290 large-truck related crashes in 2017? The Truck Safety...