Institute of Global Health Innovation

Over four weeks in May, volunteers from Made by Many worked entirely remotely with the Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) to change the way behavioural data* was communicated to policy makers.

They created a lightweight, repeatable process for delivering regular insights to a targetted audience.

Insights and opportunities

The Institute, part of Imperial College, London, has access to a worldwide data set that allows it to analyse public behaviour across 29 countries, exploring the impact of public policy on behaviour and, ultimately, how this impacts COVID-19. This is a uniquely valuable resource in the context of the pandemic.

The question we had to solve together was how to communicate the most relevant data so that policy analysts understood it and could respond quickly and effectively to what IGHI revealed was happening in their country and worldwide.

We hadn’t much time, so we searched for areas where we could create the most value in the quickest way possible. We looked at the potential users, the data, the technology available and the design. What was the best way to tell the story and make it accessible and actionable? It was vital to give insight and evidence - not instruction on policy.

Our research insights showed that IGHI could make the most impact by targeting influential analysts working directly with government and health policy makers in 30 countries - and by giving those time-poor analysts high level headlines and visual evidence on how a population was behaving.

Rapid prototyping, build + process refinement

We created two types of insight report: one country specific; one giving global insights.

We focused on improving the process: How can the reports be created and distributed with minimal manual work for the team? We examined the content: What questions do the reports have to answer to meet the needs of users? And we explored design options: How can we deliver the right content in a way that fits with process needs and creates the right impact with users?

the result was a streamlined insight generation process, a template design to be re-generated each week, integrated with the team’s existing data visualisation tools to enable even quicker report creation

Impact

In just 4 weeks, IGHI has found a way to bring this unique and valuable data set to public health officials to help them in their efforts to limit the impact of COVID-19.

IGHI now has:

*IGHI and YouGov Plc had been working together to collect global insights on peoples’ behaviours and life satisfaction in response to COVID-19. The insight report, covering 29 countries and interviewing up to 30,000 people, is updated every two weeks.