Implementation phase

Many research projects rely on complex survey operations and large-scale data workflows. The Impact Analytics team supports teams in improving these processes through better tools, protocols, and technical guidance. We support with:

• Design high-quality survey instruments and protocols
• Improve monitoring during data collection
• Strengthen data pipelines and documentation
• Integrate new technologies, including AI-enabled tools for data work

Our goal is to help teams collect and manage data in ways that reduce operational risks and improve research quality.

Handbook Chapter 4 | iesurveykit

High-quality data is the foundation of credible research. Development Impact Analytics develops tools and protocols that help teams monitor and improve data quality throughout the research process. Our Data Quality Toolkit supports teams in:

• Monitoring survey performance in real time
• Detecting errors and inconsistencies in data
• Standardizing validation and cleaning processes
• Improving data reliability across projects

Measuring the costs of interventions is essential for understanding their feasibility, resource requirements, and value for money.  Impact Analytics' Costing Program supports research teams in collecting and analyzing rigorous cost data to evaluate programs’ cost-effectiveness and weigh their benefits and costs. By quantifying the costs of achieving real-world impact, we help teams generate evidence to identify which programs are most cost-effective and whether their benefits justify their costs, informing policy decisions on scaling and resource allocation. 

We support teams through:

• Systematic cost data collection, both retrospectively and in real-time
• Cost-effectiveness, cost-benefit, and cost-efficiency analysis
• Practical tools, workshops, and trainings on costing methods

By pairing robust cost data with impact estimates, our work enables policymakers to compare program options, plan scale-ups, and allocate resources to achieve the greatest impact.

Managing research data responsibly requires careful attention to licensing, privacy, and storage. Impact Analytics provides technical support to help teams navigate these challenges.

We can support projects with:

• Data licensing guidance
• Data privacy protections
• Secure data storage solutions
• Data management protocols

This support helps ensure that research projects meet institutional standards while protecting sensitive information.

Cost data collection and analysis are critical in identifying which policies and interventions deliver the greatest impact per dollar spent. Accurate cost data can generate insights to improve program design, strengthen implementation, and sharpen evidence-based decision-making.

This session discusses approaches to cost data collection and analysis, and how to integrate costing into impact evaluations from the start. It covers key concepts, practical methods for estimating costs, and scenarios for using cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis. Participants engage in a hands-on exercise in cost data collection and leave with resources and practical tools for cost data collection and analysis

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Participants learn practical approaches to ensuring high-quality survey data from instrument design through data collection and ongoing data acquisition. The session covers:

• Core principles of ensuring high quality primary data collection

• How to program surveys to minimize data quality issues

• Strategies for monitoring and enforcing data quality in the field

• Approaches to high frequency data quality checks

• A live demonstration of the IEHFC data quality checks platform

While the session focuses on survey data, the tools and principles discussed apply to all types of raw data.

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Anyone who’s worked on surveys knows data quality matters—and catching issues early makes all the difference. But setting up data quality checks (commonly known as High Frequency Checks HFC) is often a challenge: most teams end up reinventing the wheel, building custom workflows from scratch. That’s where the IEHFC platform comes in.

This 1.5-hour session explores and tests this new Shiny app and R package, designed to simplify and standardize high-frequency checks. It offers a demo of the tool and guides participants through hands-on exercises using test data. Whether you’re an expert coder or new to HFCs, IEHFC is built to help you improve data quality while it still counts—in an accessible, easy-to-use format that integrates seamlessly into your workflow.

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Unlock the full potential of SurveyCTO with the AI Assistant. This interactive session will introduce you to SurveyCTO’s AI-powered chatbot, specially trained on comprehensive product knowledge and optimized for user support. The AI Assistant can help streamline your workflow by guiding you on best practices, suggesting form design improvements, and generating expressions like relevance and constraints directly from natural language. 

Whether you’re troubleshooting complex forms or looking for new design ideas, the AI Assistant is your partner in data collection success. Join this session to see how you can simplify tasks, save time, and enhance your SurveyCTO experience. 

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Sampling is like taking a small taste of a big dish to figure out what the whole thing is like. In this session, participants talk about different ways to pick that "taste", so it gives us a good idea of the entire dish. This session covers the nuts and bolts of how to draw a representative sample of units for a rigorous evaluation. 

The session first cover the concepts of identification, estimation, and inference in Economics. It then build on these concepts and discuss confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, and Type I and II errors. Finally, it uses all these concepts to discuss power calculations and go through some practical examples.

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In this session, Marta Costa from the Dobility team (the makers of SurveyCTO) presents an exciting new capability, the Hub. The Hub is a content library that stores data collection workflows that consist of form(s) and dataset(s) designed to work together to achieve a goal. The Hub offers great convenience to users, deploying all required files in one step with no prior survey programming knowledge required. 

Template workflows from the Hub can complete surveys or singular modules — anything you can build using the SurveyCTO platform and can be a great way to explore potential solutions to the requirements of a new project. In this session, we provide an overview of the Hub, including tips on how to more easily explore the list of available content. Next steps will be considered, like integrating content from the Hub into your work.  

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When designing an impact evaluation survey, there is always a trade-off between collecting all possible variables of interest (researcher preference) and keeping interviews as short as possible (respondent preference).

This Continuing Education session will demonstrate how to optimizing survey length by aligning the questionnaire directly to the research design, using a case study. This session is particularly recommended for Analysts, Field Coordinators, and others working closely on designing impact evaluation surveys.

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