SenseMaker®

What's its purpose in systems grantmaking?

To understand initial conditions and influencers of complex cultural systems and affect a system by reinforcing or discouraging emergent behavior patterns. Also, to enable people to understand their own environment and leverage peer-to-peer knowledge flow and innovation.

What is it?

A narrative reporting resource for large-scale data collection in which people make meaning of their own stories, images, and/or recordings as they relate to a particular issue or event. It identifies underlying attitudes and patterns of behavior across this self-signified data. It requires the use of proprietary software developed and owned by Cognitive Edge.

When is it useful?

When there are deep rooted patterns that aren’t surfaced through collective processes;
Where values or concepts are seen differently by grantees, implementers and funders;
When stakeholders believe the interpretation of data may be biased;
Where issues or problems are affected by cultural norms and perspectives;
When systems are bound by community-level issues or by geography; and
When it would be beneficial to collect high volumes of qualitative material and analyze it through quantitative techniques.

Example from the field

How does SenseMaker® work?

Girl Hub, a collaboration of the Department for International Development and the Nike Foundation, is using SenseMaker® in Rwanda to monitor the effectiveness of a country-wide mentoring program for adolescent girls.1

Projects begin with a large-scale effort to capture stories, called micro-narratives, from individual stakeholders. To do this, Girl Hub installed SenseMaker® Collector apps on smartphones and gave them to their network of 10,000 mentors. The mentors used the apps to collect micro-narratives from girls ages 11–12 during their weekly mentoring sessions. The girls were given the prompt: tell a true story about an experience in your life. This is an open-ended prompt meant to guide, but not direct the storyteller.

Storytellers then signify their experience — adding meaning to it — into a framework of meaning developed for their particular context. The project team develops the signification framework with feedback from stakeholders, funders, subject matter experts and other relevant parties. Signifying a story is a simple process of answering a series of questions by putting a mark on a triangle or linear scale, answering a multiple-choice question, and/or putting a mark on a grid. The process is about further describing the story, not evaluating it. The girls participating in the Girl Hub project completed this process by using the app on the mentor’s smartphone. Here are two examples:

SenseMaker® enables people to be their own ethnographers and change-makers in their communities by transferring the power of interpretation from an expert or an algorithm to the respondent. The self-signification framework generates consistent data, including quantitative data from the micro-narratives. The data is then analyzed in software that detects visual patterns and clusters among the micro-narratives that would not otherwise surface in collective meaning-making processes such as early changes in social dynamics and outliers. In addition, participants and/or funders often engage in participatory workshops to check the validity of the initial results and produce hypotheses for further testing and analysis in the collected data.

Girl Hub will use the data to monitor program effectiveness, rework materials to reflect current concerns, detect early signs of problems in the field, and also to share experiences and problems across the program. Mentors can also tap the data for relevant examples of a specific problem or issue they face.

1. Results of the girls mentoring program are not publicly available as of the date of this publication.

What are tips and cautions for systems grantmakers and the social sector?

Its ability to process large amounts of data, diminish intermediary interpretation bias, and account for variation among individuals is unique and results in rich data about a system.
Experts and collectors need to be trained to allow storytellers to signify their experiences in their own way, even if it is contrary to the “experts” beliefs.
In the international development context, it can be challenging to find capacity in-country to manage a SenseMaker® project. Pairing local researchers with outsider experts has helped grantmakers to build this capacity.
Support for smartphone and tablet apps makes the field capture easier and less costly.

Resources

Using SenseMaker® to Understand Girls’ Lives: Lessons Learnt From Girl Hub

By Cognitive Edge, 2014

Link to Article

Flourishing Community Index

By Cordaid, 2015

Link to Article

The Story of SenseMaker® in UNDP Eastern Europe and CIS

By Tony Quinlan
Cognitive Edge, 2015

Link to Article

Acknowledgments

Dave Snowden

Founder & Chief Scientific Officer, Cognitive Edge

Tony Quinlan

Chief Storyteller, Narrate

Systems Grantmaking Resource Guide

Resource Type

Narrative Reporting

Systems Questions

Variables

Patterns and Structure

Grantmaking Stages

Develop grantmaking strategy

Shape and monitor grants

Assess impact and learn

Participation

Highly participatory

Expertise

An expert with specialized knowledge or technology

Time

1-5 months

What's its purpose in systems grantmaking?

What is it?

When is it useful?

What are tips and cautions for systems grantmakers and the social sector?

Resources

Using SenseMaker® to Understand Girls’ Lives: Lessons Learnt From Girl Hub

Flourishing Community Index

The Story of SenseMaker® in UNDP Eastern Europe and CIS

Acknowledgments

Dave Snowden

Tony Quinlan