The eight stages
Whether your team runs these or we run them for you is the question the
engagement models answer. The
stages themselves do not change.
1 · Design
Before anything is asked
The research question becomes an instrument: the questions, their
order and their logic, the languages the instrument will be
administered in, and the consent statement a respondent hears before
any of it. The design is registered, so the analysis later runs
against what was actually planned rather than what was remembered.
- Research designs supported
- Structured survey, facility assessment, citizen feedback and qualitative work run as live designs. Mixed methods, observation and longitudinal panels are supported on the same structures. The seven registered modes.
- Qualitative formats
- Key informant interviews, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions are recorded as formats within qualitative work, with participant counts — not as separate research modes.
2 · Field preparation
Who and where
Contacts are loaded — from a spreadsheet, a workbook or typed in one
at a time — and normalised into one unambiguous form so a number is
never dialled twice or dialled wrong. An audience is then a rule over
those people, and its size is counted from your own respondents when
you ask for it.
- Consent is not assumed
- A contact can only be dialled where consent was recorded. A blank consent column is treated as unknown, never as permission, and somebody who has asked not to be contacted stays that way through a re-import.
- Enumerators and assignments
- Field staff receive assignments with their own area and due dates, and a supervisor can see what has been given out and what is outstanding.
- Offline packages
- Where a team is going somewhere without a network, the instrument and its language pack are prepared on the device before they leave.
3 · Collection
Five routes
A person replies however suits them. A web link and the offline field
application work wherever the platform is deployed. Phone, WhatsApp
and SMS are connected once a communications provider is configured
for your organisation — one account covers all three.
- Voice, in any registered language
- Recording someone's voice does not depend on which language they speak, so a respondent can answer aloud in any of the 57 African languages the platform registers, and the recording is kept as the evidence of what they said.
- What that does not mean
- Capturing speech is not understanding it. Automatic transcription reaches 15 of those languages on the published list of the speech provider we route to, and none of the 57 has been accuracy-validated by VoiceInsights against African field audio. The registry, language by language.
4 · Getting the work back
Often the longest
Work collected with no connection sits on the device until it is
confirmed received. An interrupted interview resumes at the question
it reached. A device that is running out of room says so, and refuses
a new interview rather than silently failing to save one. If a
confirmation is lost on the way back, the device sends again and the
server recognises what it already holds instead of storing it twice.
- A supervisor can see what has not arrived
- Devices report the shape of their queue — how much is waiting, how long it has been waiting, and whether the last attempt was refused.
- And what silence means
- Those figures come from devices that reached the server. A device with no connection cannot report that it has no connection, so an absent device is unknown rather than healthy — and the platform says so rather than showing a reassuring zero.
5 · Evidence management
The record
Every response carries its consent status, its origin and its
lineage. The original audio is retained — including a recording with
no discernible speech, which is stored as evidence rather than
discarded, because a refusal to answer is a finding and the recording
is the proof of what happened.
6 · Quality control
A person decides
Responses are checked for completeness, duration, consent validity
and duplication, and flagged where something does not hold. Double
entry compares two independent records of the same interview. A
supervisor decides; the platform records who decided and when.
- Where AI is involved
- Analysis assistance is separated from observation and from human interpretation, and is presented as suggestion rather than conclusion. Responsible AI.
7 · Analysis
Against the design
Descriptive results, frequencies and dispersion, with the cautions
that belong to them. Qualitative coding keeps themes, contradictions
and minority views rather than averaging them away. Findings
reference registered evidence, so a claim can be traced back to the
responses behind it.
8 · Reporting and decision support
Five formats
A governed publication is produced in the formats an institution
actually circulates, and a publication whose evidence cannot be
resolved is refused rather than produced.
- PDF
- The executive report, for circulation and for the record.
- DOCX
- An editable working document, for a team that will add its own programme context.
- PPTX
- A presentation, for the meeting where the decision is taken.
- XLSX
- A statistical workbook, for an analyst who wants the figures behind the finding.
- CSV
- The governed dataset export, for a data team or a donor's own pipeline.
- Who can export what
- Export is a permission, not a button everyone has. A role that may read a publication is not automatically a role that may compose or export one.