We currently use a range of channels to communicate departmental priorities to our global audience including UK taxpayers. We have a website, which will move onto the single government website in March 2013, and a range of accounts in the leading social media channels, including Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. Our Digital Team within DFID’s Communications Division manages these accounts, and they can be used to endorse the work of our partners and promote the activity of individuals as appropriate. We have developed a community of staff bloggers over the last 5 years which provides a human face to the department.
Case study: Hannah Ryder - DFID blogger
It is important for an organisation with staff based in offices around the world to use digital to make internal communication as effective as possible too. We are redeveloping our intranet to make it simpler, clearer and faster to find DFID information and to complete tasks. Our aim is to increase staff efficiency and to decrease calls to our helpdesks. Our approach is closely aligned to our overall digital strategy.
We are making better use of our intranet as a platform to collaborate across the whole organisation, to share and learn lessons and to improve our knowledge management.
We will improve our measurement and analysis of the different channels we use, with the aim of providing better information to teams about audiences and enable more effective targeting.
We will be more strategic about listening to and understanding conversations in social media, and use the insight gained to inform the policy-making process and to collaborate more effectively with partners.We will continue to build a centre of expertise and experience in our dedicated communications teams, by identifying and providing training on a range of specific listening tools and approaches.
Beyond our corporate accounts which broadcast and engage according to the priorities and issues we choose, there are pockets of digital experience across the organisation as staff use social media under their own names to establish their professional profiles and play a role in advancing DFID’s communication goals.
This follows the social media guidelines published in May 2012, which apply to all civil servants and are based on six principles:
We will improve our guidance on the use of social media channels for all staff, and promote it widely.
We will establish a community of social media champions, which will build on these early experiences, and move towards an environment where all staff are confident in using digital tools to listen and monitor, and many are fully competent in engaging with external debate in their own name. This model will be explored over the next 6 months.
As a first step, we will identify a small number of colleagues who already have a high level of digital skills and will work with them to encourage their teams to adopt new digital approaches.
Sector experts currently listen to and participate in on-going conversations about issues important to their field – whether this is via writing content for academic newsletters or journals, or participating in debates at conferences. There are examples of experience where teams have used a combination of traditional and digital means to consult, but this is not widespread, and the results have not been formally evaluated and shared across the organisation.
Policy making should be a constant process of dialogue and engagement. The appropriate use of digital channels will allow us to gather advice from the widest and most relevant voices, and will help to build confidence that we have the right solution.
Digital technology, in particular mobile, offers opportunities in the countries where we work to get data back from projects quickly which will support faster and better decision making. Such feedback loops would ensure funding support is appropriately timed - for example, ensuring projects that monitor elections receive funding in step with the electoral cycle in their country.
We will run pilot projects in a number of developing countries and through the Global Poverty Action Fund to test ways of seeking feedback from the people directly affected by aid projects. These pilots will test various mechanisms to give and receive feedback, including the use of web and mobile technology. Results of the pilots will be used to influence future project design in country programmes to ensure that the voices of those who receive UK aid - both governments and their people - are considered.
We will enable citizens to hold their governments to account by improving local transparency and better informing people about what services and other entitlements they should be receiving. We will also use digital means to get feedback on the performance of suppliers in countries.
We will establish recommendations for how feedback could be incorporated into the international aid data standard.
Case study: Online consultation
Currently, our digital and communications specialists provide advice to DFID staff wherever there is a digital element of a project to ensure they are achieving value for money and that they take advantage of open source software to keep costs down. Our procurement team review such projects to ensure that is the correct procurement route is followed.
To inform our decisions we will convene a digital advisory panel which will invite experts with a range of different technical and implementation experience to share their knowledge. We also aim to recruit a non-executive director with experience in the technology sector
To take advantage of the opportunities in programme design for low cost communication, feedback and dissemination offered by social media, we will create the role of Digital Service Adviser to provide advice and guidance if there is any significant digital spend in a programme. We will check that communications, evaluation, programme and procurement teams are well-equipped to provide and seek advice. This will ensure the right shape to the programme, that the correct procurement procedures are followed and that it achieves value for money.
Case study: A new way to approach programme design
By March 2013, the DFID website will have moved onto the Inside Government section of the single government website. Our content will continue to inform anyone who wants to find out about DFID’s policies and results to see where and how they fit with the work of other UK government departments in delivering the UK’s aid programme.
We will work closely with the Government Digital Service to ensure the needs of our global audience are met by the new website.We will ensure that visitor insight and feedback is part of developing new areas of policy content, ensuring that evidence is in place to support new content before it goes onto GOV.UKWe will use statistics and user journey information provided by the GOV.UK platform to review content and make changes based on that evidence.
We have made significant improvements in becoming a more transparent organisation, in line with the Coalition Government’s standards for transparency, as set out by the Prime Minister in May 2010. Full details of our plans and activities in this area can be found in our Open Data Strategy.
The strategy outlines how open data can have an impact on development by enabling people to track aid spending and see the results that are being achieved. It was published in June 2012 along with those of other UK Government Departments under the White Paper on Open Data.
In June 2010 we launched the UK Aid Transparency Guarantee. It commits us to publishing detailed information about new DFID projects and policies in a way that is comprehensive, accessible, comparable, accurate and timely.
We are committed not only to publishing our own data transparently, but also in creating, endorsing and encouraging others to comply with international standards. We want to go further, ensuring maximum traceability – not just of our funds, but all public money spent on overseas development, including what happens when it is allocated and spent by third parties.
We have taken the lead on publishing our monthly expenditure on all transactions over £500, while most other central government departments are currently publishing transactions over £25,000.
DFID’s projects information database contains details of projects that have been operational or completed since 2009, in line with the UK Aid Transparency Guarantee. Each project contains financial details, the country and sector and how the project is divided up. All new projects now include annual reviews, completion reports, business cases and intervention summaries.
Open data
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a major international open data initiative involving donor countries, developing country governments, non-governmental organisations and experts in aid information.In February 2011 the participants agreed a common open international standard for publishing information on aid. There are now 29 donor and 22 partner country signatories, covering 75% of global aid. Twenty-four organisations are currently publishing data to the standard.DFID had a significant role in leading IATI and was the first organisation to publish information to this international standard.
We are piloting a new aid information platform that will make information accessible through a web platform for users to search, browse and export UK aid data, providing the ability to drill down through the aid delivery chain. The platform will be released as open source code so that others can reuse and repurpose the data for their own needs. We will also provide an application programming interface (API) to enable others to access the data and create applications.
We will further develop the published data on DFID aid projects to include results so that the public can understand what is achieved from specific aid projects. The first results delivered against the 25 centrally monitored indicators in DFID's Results Framework have been published as reusable data. Other results are published within project documents and we will include project-level results in IATI data. Project performance scores using DFID’s new scoring model will be released as reusable electronic data by February 2013.
We will provide more detailed location information (also known as geocoding) for individual projects using recognised international methodology, with a view to applying this methodology to all new aid projects by March 2014.
We will investigate how to define a Linked Data approach for aid data, based on the IATI standard, and will conduct a study by October 2013, exploring implementation by March 2014. This will provide greater traceability of aid spend.
Case study: Transparency and the new aid information platform
Innovation, new technologies, science and a strong evidence base are essential for improving and sustaining the best development and humanitarian outcomes for the poorest. They help us enhance the ways in which we currently work and make decisions based on the best value for money. DFID is committed to commissioning world class research which directly improves people’s lives, and ensuring that it is readily available to those who can use it around the world. DFID also aims to use the best evidence, from any source, in its own decisions, and to evaluate programmes so that we can learn lessons from them.
We require that all research produced as a result of public money from the research partners we fund is freely accessible on our Research for Development (R4D) database. R4D provides access to more than 30,000 DFID-funded research documents and project information, and 3,000 research organisations working across the world.
In July 2012, we put in place an Open and Enhanced Access Policy for the research that we fund. The policy mandates making all DFID funded research available in open-access sources. The policy will offer users worldwide greater online access to the outputs of the research that we fund, including academic articles, reports and datasets. We expect this policy to increase the uptake and use of DFID research, especially amongst researchers, policy makers and practitioners in developing countries, by removing price barriers to research outputs and increasing their availability and visibility. The policy applies to new research commissioned after 1 November 2012.
Through better digital engagement we will enhance access to the research that we fund. We will support our researchers to promote the open, digital availability of their work as well as ensuring that our research partners are putting the open and enhanced access policy into practice.
We will continue to develop the R4D database to deliver what users need. We will ensure the contents are made available in the different aggregated databases used by researchers. We will work to improve the way in which our research programmes use social media tools to direct different types of user to the information that is most relevant to them. We will also actively work with the programmes we support that use data repositories to make these open access and comply with international standards.
Case study: Technology already supporting development - iCow
We offer an enquiry service where individuals can contact us by phone, email, letter or online form to ask their question. Most enquiries can be resolved quickly and easily by pointing enquirers to the relevant page on the DFID website, if they have to access it. For those people who contact us who do not have access to digital communications, we are able to provide them with information either by phone or by letter.
Requests under the Freedom of Information Act are received and dealt with mainly by electronic means and we accept requests from the What Do They Know? website. A selection of responses to FOIA requests are posted on the DFID website. Data on our performance in dealing with FOIA requests is published centrally on the Ministry of Justice website.
Surveys asking for customer feedback from public enquiries have demonstrated a high degree of satisfaction from users of the service. We will ensure that issues frequently raised continue to be published on our website.
See Annex 2 for details.
There are two current models for evaluating our work: externally, reviews are commissioned by the Independent Commission on Aid Impact (ICAI), and within the organisation we are building strong evaluation skills in operational teams, thereby developing a culture where rigorous evaluation is a routine and accepted part of the policy and project cycle.
Monitoring and evaluation plans should be built in before programmes start. They need to consider how programmes will be adjusted to respond to developments in technologies and what works best, and how lessons learned can be shared across DFID and the sector.
We will explore how digital mechanisms can improve the way we commission and gather feedback, in particular looking at how the process can be speeded up. This will enable decisions to be made earlier in the life of a project. We will look at how digital approaches such as real time tracking of delivery can improve monitoring of projects and provide evidence to challenge corruption.
Next section: Transactional services
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