Assessing the success of national CCE platforms

The CDAC Network supports more than 23 national communication and community engagement platforms across the world. But how do we know if they are meaningfully contributing to better outcomes in humanitarian preparedness and response?

To close this gap, with Ground Truth Solutions, we just published a Framework for Assessing Success of National CCE Platforms. It is designed to clearly lay out the different elements that combine to build a complete platform. Each element in the framework includes measures that can be used to assess whether the part is complete and performing as expected.

National CCE Platforms are designed to provide a national capability to support a full lifecycle of engagement between communities and those that support them during a crisis. This is a nationally-based effort to listen to communities, use those insights to guide and adapt response strategies, and then effectively communicate information that communities and individuals need. In this full cycle of engagement, communities and the organisations that provide support in a crisis are on an equal basis, exchanging information with each other and then using that information to guide their respective choices and actions.

Because national CCE Platforms have so many interconnected pieces, including complex organisational and capacity building elements, they are difficult to deliver with traditional project management practices. It is seldom practical to establish a fixed plan, with specific features that will be executed in a fixed time frame, producing specific predefined results.

Teams working to build a CCE Platform will be more successful if they progressively evolve the platform, learning and adapting their approach as work progresses. With this strategy, work on several parts are undertaken in parallel and then quickly tested together. This “thin slice” of the ultimate platform vision provides early insights into how the platform will perform. This allows the team to learn and adjust, before adding the next thin slice.

This framework is intended to support this kind of evolutionary development. It provides a complete picture of all the key elements that ultimately must come together and provides ways to measure progress with each iteration. The framework is based on high-level goals for the overall Platform and for each of the three component systems, along with the desired impact that each goal seeks to deliver.

>> Download the Framework for Assessing Success of National CCE Platforms in English and French