Sharing research and evaluation findings.

The Challenge

Mastercard Foundation’s Rural and Agricultural Finance (RAF) Learning Lab conducted research with partners on the opportunities that Big Data provides for smallholder finance providers. They wanted to make their research count: to see the important findings contribute to innovation and improved practices. Their target audience for the research findings (smallholder finance providers) are busy people who might not get round to reading a report. They do, however, tend to be well connected by phone and social media (the Mastercard foundation has 131,945 FB followers, 1520 followers on You tube and 12200 on Instagram).

Visual Tool selected

The RAFlearning lab communication team decided to create a short whiteboard animation to share the key findings of the research and the practical applications in an accessible and user friendly way suited to the busy target audience. The animation was designed to be shared on the RAFlearning lab website, by social media and at meetings. Below the animation there was a link to the full  Learning Brief report, so that those who were interested by the summary could find out more. 

The Process

I worked together with the RAFlearning lab team to condense the Learning brief report into a  three and a half minute animation. My experience of working with smallholder farmers in East Africa helped me understand the concepts and develop suitable illustrations. As I worked on the storyboard, I met regularly with RAFlearning team members in London and USA by Skype. We went through several iterations of the storyboard until we had something the team were happy with and which fitted with the RAFlearning website style.

Click on the links below to see some similar projects.

Read my reflections on using Visual Tools to support Evaluations here