The Insight Atlas, A Global Majority Data Hub for Social Listening

A social insights digital platform to help scale global development

Partner: Children’s Investment Fund Foundation
Sector: Development & Humanitarian Aid
Location: Global

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Brand & Content
Digital & Tech
Research & Strategy

The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) is one of the world’s largest philanthropic independent funders. They invest in and empower ideas that address urgent, intersecting crises and systemic failures in areas including climate action, gender empowerment and childhood.

They asked us how to connect their 400 grantees and partners across Europe, Africa, East Asia and South East Asia with powerful insight tools that would help them make a bigger and better impact in children’s lives. With so many out there, we designed and built the Insight Atlas, a digital platform to make it easy for organisations all over the world to figure out which insights tools can have the greatest impact on their programmatic goals.

100+ tools mapped

Our research identified and prioritised over 100 digital tools that have the power to provide insights for social impact projects.

An easy-to-use global platform

Our evaluation showed partners scored the tool between 4-5 on a scale of 1-5 for ease of use, motivation and usefulness. We call that a success!

Scalable for the future

Rolled out amongst 50+ CIFF grantees with a vision to be shared globally with the social impact community.

The challenge

Social insights can be a powerful force for improving productivity and increasing efficiency, not least within international development. But many of CIFF’s grantees were not fully aware of the digital tools that could help support their programmes and campaigns, from Google to Meta, as well as more sophisticated platforms like Brandwatch.

Often lacking time, capacity and perceived expertise, CIFF wanted to provide grantees and partners with a digital platform to help them understand what insights tools could help to increase success project success, as well as the methods used for maximising the power of these tools. To address this challenge, CIFF asked us to design and build a resource that armed their grantees with the knowledge to monitor, optimise, and evaluate programmes and campaigns.

The solution

Through a collaboration with several other specialist agencies, we collaborated with CIFF to co-create the Insight Atlas – a first-of-it’s-kind online platform that allows users to explore more than 100 powerful digital tools, handpicked for the social impact space. We carried out all of the research, branding, design, testing and development work that was needed to bring it to life, including in-depth consultations across the Global South.

We also helped the Insight Atlas become the foundation for an online community of changemakers who are making a difference through better insights, including PSI (Sexual Health), Girl Effect (Gender), and PAC (Climate). As well as the directory of tools, we also created resources and case studies to provide social proof to increase adoption.

Key Insights

The importance of co-creation and testing.

How can the social impact sector harness their insights and benefit from a landscape of digital tools, in the same way, and as effectively as the commercial sector? We undertook interviews and surveys with 65 of CIFF's partners and grantees to better understand the challenges they faced. We identified a need to plug learning gaps and developed a library of digital tools that would assist grantees in better understanding, monitoring, influencing and evaluating programmes and campaigns for better impact.

The insights from pilots can be eye-opening. Before a full launch or rollout, pilot your products and tools for a final sense check. There are always a few bits to finesse!

With CIFF, we tested our tool for six months with partners PSI and PAC before rolling it out to more grantees.