I wanted to submit Devcompage to the university’s research and extension office as a legitimate extension activity of my department. To do that, I wrote a full-blown proposal that included a logframe.  The logical framework specified the goal, purpose, output, verifiable indicators, means of verification, and assumptions and risks. Well, the objectives of Devcompage are not lofty. In one of my earliest posts, I admitted that it was my son who suggested that I write a blog so that my students will have 24/7 online access to course materials whenever I am on travel.  For the proposal, I wrote these objectives:

  1. Share information on best practices in development communication in Asia.
  2. Serve as an online resource on methods in communication research and practice – monitoring and evaluation, campaigns, entertainment education, pretesting, educational communication and general development communication topics.
  3. Provide thesis or research advice to communication students.
  4. Encourage discussion or comment on development communication issues.

When I gave the proposal to my supervisor for review, she raised the question of impact assessment.  I told her that the goal of Devcompage is to improve the knowledge and practice of development communicationof students, teachers and development practitioners, and since weblogs are new social media, there are standard impact measures reflected in blog statistics. Peter Shelton of Web Tastings, describes web impact measures to include:

  1. Page views/visitors
  2. Downloads
  3. Citations
  4. Mentions in the media/blogs
  5. RSS feeds
  6. Search engine rankings

In Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations for Measuring Your Success, Avinash Kaushik lists the following:

1) Raw Author Contribution
2) Holistic Audience Growth
3) Conversation Rate
4) “Citations”?/ “Ripple Index”?
5) Cost
6) Benefit / ROI

Pete Shelton and A. Kaushik are telling us that quantification is the key to measuring blog success, but how do you deal with a supervisor whose mantra is  qualitiatve research?  She suggested that blog impact can can be assessed using a qualitative research approach.  The assessment, she said, will rely on stories about how Devcompage has helped a student write his thesis, or a field worker plan his communication campaign, or an agricultural extension office design and implement a radio soap opera on HIV/AIDS. Without saying it, I knew she was rooting for “most significant change” (MSC) technique.

Originally developed by Rick Davies, the MSC technique stemmed from his work with a participatory rural development project in Bangladesh in 1994. It has since been applied and promoted by Jessica Dart in Australia. Dart and Davies describe it as:

… a dialogical, story-based technique. Its primary purpose is to facilitate program improvement by focusing the direction of work towards explicitly valued directions and away from less valued directions. MSC can also make a contribution to summative evaluation through both its process and its outputs. The technique involves a form of continuous values inquiry whereby designated groups of stakeholders search for significant program outcomes and then deliberate on the value of these outcomes in a systematic and transparent manner.

This is all fine but how do I convince the donors and biological scientists I work with outside the university who generally scoff at qualitative research as merely “story telling” and lack rigor?  With all the fuss about having to be explicit about impact assessment for a blog that did not involve university resources, I decided to shelve the proposal.

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