 Well, welcome everyone to this joint event of the Social Impact Management Network Australia and the Australian Evaluation Society, Simna and AES. Before we proceed, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional lands, where I am, which is in Brisbane or Minjin, and the traditional lands here, where the traditional owners were the Jaguar and the Turbul people. Thank you all for joining us today. My name's Rebecca Robach. I'm a social impact advisor based here in Brisbane and I've got the joy of being on the organising committees for both Simna and the AES here in Queensland. The idea of today is really simple. What we wanted to do was really just to share some local impact tools and platforms that can be used for social impact measurement that have been homegrown here in Queensland. Really just an opportunity for practitioners, either social impact tool evaluators, to find out more about some of the local products that are on offer. Based on, we've had a really, really great response to today's event, so I think there's a lot of interest out there to find out more about the local impact measurement tools and platforms that do exist. We've invited three presenters today to share their Queensland-grown social impact measurement tools and platforms, and that's Sarah Mack from Folktale. He's also joined by Mel Harwin, Joss Merche from Little Phil, and Luke Everett from Torch. I just wanted to pause here to make sure we've let everyone into the waiting room, which we have, and also just to acknowledge who we are recording today's event as well, which hopefully you would have received an alert as you logged in. The format today is going to be essentially each of the presenters will talk about their platform or their tool. There'll be an opportunity for you to ask any questions of them before we move on to the next presenter. We will have some Q&A at the end as well across. Because we do have a large group that's attending, if it could ask everyone to please put any questions that you think of during the presentations into chat, and we'll manage the questions so that we can obviously coordinate that and make sure the discussion runs really smoothly. The other thing, if you can stay on mute as well while presenters are talking, and obviously we'll take you off mute if you wanted to ask a question directly, but if you can use the chat function, that would be really good. So, I will put in the chat as well, a link to each of our presenters' websites, as well as their LinkedIn profiles. Both Sarah, Josh, and Luke and Mel are really happy for you to contact them after the session today as well, if you have any other questions, or if you'd like to talk directly to them about how they might be able to help your impact measurement. So, without further ado, let me properly introduce each of our presenters and then I'll throw them just in one or two sentences explain what their impact measurement platform tool is, and then we'll kick off with Sarah presenting about FOTO. So, each of our presenters today, Sarah Mack from FOTO is going to be our first presenter. So, Sarah is a passionate entrepreneur driving change through real stories. She's the co-founder and CEO of FOTO, which is a technology platform with a mission to transform how organisations globally approach storytelling in order to monitor, evaluate, and communicate their ongoing impact. Sarah's career spans public health, global development, filmmaking, and technology. She's shifting how communities, programs, and donors connect their hearts and minds through the power of story. Joining Sarah to talk about FOTO is Mel Harwin. Mel is the head of stories at FOTO, and she comes from a background in social impact measurement and evaluation. She was the inaugural head of impact at Global Systems and led their impact management function between 2018 and 2020, which went on to win a Simna Innovation Award in 2022. So, I won't throw to Sarah and Mel to speak just yet, but Sarah, did you want to maybe just in one or two sentences explain what FOTO is? Thanks, Rebecca. Can everyone hear me okay? Wonderful. So, FOTO is a technology platform, and our goal is to collect qualitative data through video in the form of stories. So, that is the high level one-liner. Thanks, Sarah. And I'd like to now introduce our second presenter, who will be Josh Merchie from Little Phil. Josh co-founded Little Phil, which is short for Little Philanthropist. It's a micro philanthropy fundraising platform for nonprofits. He did this while he was studying his masters of IT at Griffith University, and he's the current speaker. Josh has been a fellow of the Griffith University Uni Centre for Social Enterprise. He was the Australian Student Volunteer of the Year in 2017-2018. He's also the Gold Coast Young Entrepreneur of the Year and Griffith University's Young Outstanding Alumni of the Year for 2023. Josh and the Little Phil team have won a number of Innovation Awards and have been featured at tech conferences in Asia, North America and Europe. Josh, would you like to, in one or two sentences, just introduce Little Phil to us? Thanks, Rebecca. So Little Phil, we're connecting people, businesses and brands more directly with charities, causes and beneficiaries. So making the process more transparent, engaging and lowering overheads. Great. Thanks, Josh. And finally, but certainly not least, our third presenter will be Luke Everett from Torch. Luke is also an IT professional, and he spent the last 15 years working in international development with teams from DFAT, the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office and USAID. After working with teams to design and implement information systems for stakeholder reported, I think he learnt some lessons. So he started Project I.I. with some colleagues to improve impact measurement and stakeholder engagement and the result of which has been Torch. So Luke, would you like to just very, very briefly introduce Torch to us? Sure. So Torch is an impact management platform that's designed to take the juridury and the manual processes out of impact measurement and power teams to actually get that data out in front of people instead of having it in silos and just using it for reporting and stuff like that. So that's what we do. So I think that'll be of interest to a lot of people here. Do a lot of work in theory of change and programme development. Great. Well, thank you again to all of our presenters for joining us today. I'd like to now invite Sarah to kick us off with, I guess, a deep dive into, into folktale. As I mentioned, if you can, any questions for Sarah as she's going through, if you can please put them in the chat. And if you can just note that there are questions for Sarah as well as we don't get them confused, confused later on. And I'll hand over to Sarah. Thanks, Rebecca. And thank you for the introduction as well. So before I start, I've just done a screen share of our presentation confirming with a couple of hands up that you're able to see it. Okay. Amazing. So we've got 15 minutes to talk about folktale and there's quite a lot to talk about. So I guess thinking about the outcome in mind, we're not going to go into a deep dive on all of the different features that folktale can do. Today is about imagining if you wanted to potentially approach and use folktale as a platform, as potentially a method or approach as part of methodology. What are some of the things that you might want to consider? So we're just going to talk about that very quickly as well. And so then a male also will be joining me midway through in some of the presentation. Now. This is our website. And I think Rebecca mentioned that she'll also post it on the chat, but for very, very quickly. If you're interested in having a bit of a play on the platform, at the very right hand side of our platform, there's a button called get started. And there you're able to sign up for your very free workspace to be able to like, have a little bit of a play as to all of the different features and roles that you might be able to use within folktale as well. So quickly that is just one of the things that you can have a play with whilst I'm going through the presentation. So we're going to talk about storytelling and it's without saying that I think it's been a really big conversation in the last couple of years. More broadly about the power of storytelling and what it means for us as practitioners. So stories of the way is the language that we use to understand the world. And more importantly, I guess for us at folktale, we believe that in order to achieve a more equity focused, culturally responsive and participatory evaluation and impact measurement practice, we need to enable communities to evaluate their voices from where they are. And then what we believe here is also one of the most effective ways of achieving this is through the use of storytelling. Because stories are a powerful means of expressing our lived experiences, conveying identities, while promoting understanding. And also through storytelling, individuals and communities can reflect on their experiences, make sense of them, and then ultimately create meaning as well. And so one of the things that we think about here is, okay, well what do we mean by stories, right? So effectively stories is a retelling and telling of information as told by different stakeholders. And so when we break down the different uses of story at folktale, we just wanted to break them into three components. So stories can be used for data in terms of qualitative data, engaging teams, programs, communities, and in our platform, we have different types of features and including being able to set and build templates against any of your methodologies to be able to code content, map themes and leverage lean and real time qualitative data to uncover hidden insights or evaluate and measure impact. In addition, the importance of stories for sharing. So folktale puts the power of storytelling in the palm of everyone's hands. Because we are a technology platform, we have the ability to scale and enables individuals to share their stories in their own ways without third-party intervention. Authentic participant-led storytelling that fosters connections and inspires positive change. And finally, the importance of connection through story. It's a lot more effective beyond numbers. People remember stories. It's really hard to actually remember numbers. And so what? Why do they matter? Particularly in the work that we do. And so stories speak to the heart to move the mind. They inspire others, tell a shared organizational story through the many stories. And we also, through folktale, the goal is fostering connections by allowing storytellers to share their experiences, motivating supporters and donors. So really quickly, three kind of thematics around how we define a story at folktale. Now, the world has changed. The world is here right now. And one of the things that we wanted to talk about as well is the medium in which we are actually connecting through story. And the medium itself is through video. And so if our intent is stories, the approach that we're taking through qualitative data is how do we actually scale it through the process of video? So we have three main things that are happening, including like market trends. There's a rise of mobile technology globally. There's a dominance and effectiveness of video as a medium. And also the rise of this conversation around artificial intelligence. So those are really three big things happening around the world and we can't shy away from them. And there's some interesting stats here that talk about the effectiveness of video and these stats are taken from Cisco. And so it talks about the effectiveness of video in terms of watching something rather than reading text that people would rather learn via video, 72% and also the world's traffic, the internet traffic, 80%, if not more is dominated by video. So this is really here and now the way that we're engaging. Now very quickly with the end in mind, if we do incorporate video into our impact measurement practices, a really quick case study is we do work with a lot of DFAT funded programs. And so previously before folktale, without using folktale, they used to write traditional reports. And so anecdotally, we do have this information that at DFAT when they receive this report, the program acknowledged that only two out of 22 people from DFAT read that report. Now working with folktale, incorporating the use of video as a complimentary part of the reporting process, rather than two of 22 reading the report, actually 17 of 22 actually watched the video, 17 rather than two. And also all of the innovations highlighted in that video got picked up by DFAT and were taken to scale and implemented. It opened their eyes to the things they wanted to look for in the report. So that's really quite a really important anecdote to suggest that this platform is not solely for the individual sharing their story. There is something in a particular role for the different parts and the different kind of stakeholders that engage with the listening, collecting, reviewing and sharing of stories as well. So really quickly, what is folktale? I really quickly mentioned that it's a qualitative data platform for the collection of video. So as a technology platform, we're really user friendly and we streamline how you're able to collect effectively video and qualitative data. There's a whole bunch of different ways that we can do it, but for the purposes of today, there you're able to collect code, translate, securely manage your data in order to evaluate, adapt and learn, as well as rapidly share authentic program and community stories. There's this level of inclusivity because of the ability to, depending on your workflow, be able to launch this as part of your program. Now, as I mentioned before, we are a method or approach that can be incorporated into your methodology and we're also not an out of the box solution. It does take a couple of months for your different stakeholders to understand the role that they play and how they can utilize Folktale for their activity. So that means that we do require some training for the technology components to it, but also how you integrate it into your program workflow for all of your different stakeholders. And then also we have designed this with the sector in mind. So we do have different flows for environments that have little to no connectivity that don't have technology equipment, but also how do we actually scale this so that more inclusive voices can participate in the sharing of stories. And so this participatory approach through video storytelling is where individuals can show and tell their stories that matter to them. So very quickly here, these are just some of the things on the Folktale platform that you can do. So in there, depending on which role you play, you're able to invite stories through designed templates. So templates there are really about keeping it super simple for contributors to be able to contribute their story. So it's about telling and showing and making it super simple to share the story, and we do the rest in terms of the process and all of the kind of putting it together into something that's engaging and coherent. On the platform as a closed platform, we're able to watch, learn, and then have a couple of ways to summarize and then share it back to the key informants that matter most. And most important as well, we do have different flows for translations, globally informed consent, and privacy and data security as well. These are just some of the places as a new company that we have engaged with globally. And what's important here is that we have worked in some of the most remote environments in the world. And that's important for us because the more that we're able to use technology as an enabler, for you to be able to use this as part of your workflow, the better. Because naturally here, it's a faster, easier, more cost-effective way for you to be able to incorporate the collection of qualitative data through video into your workflow as well. Now, very quickly, because of today's timing, we don't have time to show you what particular outcomes look like. But imagine if you wanted to, I guess, quickly see what was happening with a community and someone's going to visit that particular community. You're able to grab a template and you're able to follow into, let's say, a five-shot template. Tell me what's happening. Show me the environment. Tell me why it matters. Show me the people that are involved. In all of that, you just focus on completing all of those individual shots. Boat Tail magically stitches it together and then submits it back to your library no matter where you're based as well. Not me there. I'm going to hand it over to Mel because now we're going to talk about making it relevant based on a few examples that we have worked with from programs. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Hi, everyone. I am joining from Duck in Young Country on the Central Coast of New South Wales. So I'm not technically Queensland, but I'm supporting Sarah. Yeah. So my background is in mainly international development and evaluation and impact measurement. So I just wanted to share something. I guess it's a problem that Folktale is helping solve. This is a case study from an Australian based NGO working across 40 local partners in 20 countries with over 60 projects. And I think I just wanted to share this case study because it's probably a traditional but consistent way that data has been collected for monitoring evaluation and impact. And it raises some kind of issues that people are facing at the moment. So some desk based research basically of the processes that were being used was that it was taking over six months from report collection or story collection to review and reporting or feedback on those reports. So this was a qualitative sort of monitoring evaluation cycle. And you'll see here the time and process that the journey of this sort of story was taking was translated over, I think, so five times was the average translation that happened from diverse language groups in remote parts of communities to maybe a field officer or then to a head office, then to an Australian based office, then to maybe DFAT, there was sort of this changing of hands happening. So in that process, story is being translated languages being translation, but there's also subjectivity and the rigor around the data is getting and lost in that process. So what happens is what we're finding was from field to inbox, it was a six month time lapse. The changing of hands meant that the data wasn't as quality, the quality of the data was lost. But also the ethics around data sovereignty, consent were being confused. And then by the purpose of using this, not only for qualitative data, but for storytelling, engaging, marketing, and comms teams and donors, the trouble was that 70% of them were unable to be used because they'd misplaced consent or the quality wasn't there for dual purposes. And so I just wanted to show this as a case study of a before scenario, where Folktale kind of was able to come and streamline a process and those points of collection, management, security, and then reporting were streamlined into kind of three to five steps. Sarah, can you just move on to the next slide? And so how, how or where would you be thinking about designing this Folktale? So at the bottom here, you'll see these are kind of your steps to M&E plan development that are pretty generic, but you'd probably all recognise that identified identification piece where you're identifying the audience of your data collection, the purpose, the questions you want answered, the indicators or metrics you're mapping to and choosing your tools or methods or data sources. So at this point, you have the ability to kind of use the Folktale platform to select the appropriate templates, set up the timing of reporting for just, that's aligned with your cycle, reporting cycles or data collection cycles, and then begin to implement from the design, sort of activation phase of your M&E planning. And so from there it goes through the process of creating stories that are participant led. And so your data collectors are either individuals themselves or reporters, field reporters on their behalf. And at that point you can be theming the templates that you're using and gaining consent to start that coding and meaning making at the collection point. And then obviously it's travelling in real time back to a dashboard which is able to see what's coming in. And already with those predefined tags, you can, whether they're to SDGs that you're measuring to or different metrics, internal metrics, you're able to start to map story straightaway to help with that analysis piece. So next slide is, is this back to you or is it back to me? It's back to me. No, very quickly. Thanks for that. So in terms of, I guess the platform itself, just as a reminder, what I guess Mel has just alluded to is that the platform itself is really quite simple in terms of its features. I think the biggest thing to consider is what role do you play and how do you integrate this as part of your particular role? So if you're there to select and implement, that's a collect and invite the right stakeholders to contribute to qualitative data through video, then you'd have a particular role and feature set. And then we do have the contributors, no matter where they're based. And it doesn't matter if they have connectivity or equipment, there's a way for them to be able to participate through the medium of video. And when we talk about the rich medium, again here, it's video, but also audio photos, just the richness of what we're often showing and telling through this modality of qualitative video as well. And then finally back onto the platform, as we mentioned, there's come capabilities around the dashboard to tag, share, and then to be able to make more analysis of the information that's captured as well. What I wanted to also share very quickly before I go into the next slide is just because of the nature of this environment and the time that we had. I just wanted to quickly share another example here. Now I've put it into the meeting chat because I've got two resources that I'm going to share. This is really quickly one of the DFAT programs that we work with. And so for the first 12 months, it took about, took a while for everyone to understand the different roles and responsibilities that they had to play. And then ultimately from there, the M&E team, as well as the communication team, work hand in hand to be able to use Folktale as a way to report back to DFAT. That's great because now it is an easier way for partners to participate. It's more inclusive because now they're able to be able to do it in a way that is, I guess, easy. And most importantly, it's also really engaging with all of the community members as well. The reasons why I'm sharing with you this link is because they created this Folktale Oscars, which is unintended benefit, which I thought was wonderful. They did this all themselves to celebrate all the different partners and programs. And as a result of the work that they're done, the participants also have more confidence in speaking and sharing in this way that otherwise they had not had this skill. So it's another form of building capacity with more folks in your program and communities as well. There is a question here very quickly, a large amount edited through the platform to extract insights. So I might just go through these afterwards. I'll finish this and then go back to those two questions and thank you for that. So that's the first one. And then finally, very quickly before we wrap up, these are just some of the customers that we work with nationally and globally. And so really it's about finding that initial context, understanding that there are a lot of stories to be told. And it's not that we're solving for storytelling. We're actually solving for the process, the really difficult way of scaling and including participant voices. And so each of them naturally have different programs that we engage with. And we're just getting started as well. Now, as I mentioned at the very start, I know this is super high level. We normally go through a bit more of a features and demo and stuff. And that's why I just wanted to call your attention to, if you wanted to have a little sticky beak of the actual platform and play the different roles, feel free to get started. Found on the top right-hand corner of our website. There's also a really quick 90-second video that's directly on our website that actually unpacks the entire flow of our platform today. I didn't want to share that today because of connectivity is everywhere. And I didn't think that experience would be as nice. Finally, two final slides is that Mel and I will be presenting at this year's AES conference. So if any of you are interested and or will be participating, please come by and say hello. It'd be great to put faces to names and also learn more about your programs that you are working across. So we've got one here that Mel and I are facilitating. The first one, harnessing the transformative power of participant-wide storytelling for evaluation. There's a QR code there. And the second one is actually working in concert with one of our partners. So a lot of the impact that's been achieved, evaluating and monitoring sports programs in the Pacific. So it's the team-up article that I've just shared with you. And then finally, I know that Rebecca has already shared at the very beginning, but thank you for your time today. We'll go into the Q&A section. These are our QR codes for our LinkedIn, our emails. Reach out if you'd like to learn more and we can have a deeper dive into the actual capabilities of the platform itself. So I'm just looking at time. I think I'm up. Now, Rebecca, I think we'll go into the Q&A timing. Great. Thanks, Sarah. And I have the pleasure of catching up with Sarah every few months and always hearing what amazing stuff she's up to. And you can see just folk tales being working on some really interesting stuff. Just having a look at the questions that have come through. Sarah, we've got one from Tassim. What are the common challenges that come with video story collection? Would you like to answer that? That's a really great question. And there are a lot of challenges and opportunities. And we're constantly monitoring and improving the experience. Now, when we're thinking about video story collection, we have to think about the roles, right? So understanding have we designed it with the right context in mind? So starting at the very beginning in the design phase of it. Why are we doing it? Why does it matter? Why this approach? And is it going to be effective for the communities or programs and stakeholders that we want to collect from? So those are just generally phase one. Does this actually meet the plan requirements of what you want to do? Now, if we think about, like, those who are sharing their story or, you know, being able to like submit stories, we've got some challenges with regards to the technical side of things. So understanding basic things like shaky camera or I don't feel confident speaking to camera or I've not used technology before. This is difficult. So there are technical components to it, but also some ethical components. Am I safe to take out my equipment in an environment? Am I safe or am I putting others in jeopardy or at risk as well? You can see that we have thought about all of those things. This by no means not perfect. We do have some kind of modules in what we call Folk Tale Academy. And so if you sign up for that workspace, you automatically get about 50 modules of Folk Tale Academy things. Everything from composition, audio, lighting, which then challenges the actual engagement of video collection, but also the things to consider as well, the ethics, safeguarding and consent process. When you do collect those stories as well. So what I'm trying to say is there are a lot of challenges, but naturally when you go through our platform, we try and streamline that, keep it as simple as possible so that when you are collecting stories, you know that our platform has security, privacy, consent in mind, and that at least it's a safe and closed environment for you to be able to collect qualitative data through video at scale. Is that helpful? Just in terms of high level things in the chat. Great. Thanks, Sarah. I'm just going to go through. I think Mel's been very kind in answering some of these in the chat. But one of the questions I suppose from Mary Jane was if you could share a screenshot of the template and who owns the data once collected. Amazing. So in terms of templates themselves, I might go for the second one while I'm preparing this at the same time. When we talk about templates, I'm just going to go through very quickly. Let's see. Bear with me. Here we go. Just going to share a screen. All right. So these are just some of the templates available on our platform. And so templates again are a combination of telling and showing shots. And this role in visibility is only available to those who have a particular job to be done. So let's say you're a program manager, you're a Merle officer. So here we've got some basics so you can take a look at the getting started or let's say milestone ones. We've got a series of questions telling shots and showing shots. So here it's just a matter of reviewing all of the existing platform or existing templates available on our platform, getting you past the blank page. And then you're able to edit this template, modify it to make it more specific to your needs. You can also adjust it to any language of choice as well, as well. So this is an example of a couple of templates. And so what that looks like is if you looked at, let's say, field report template or goals and vision template, you can take this, you can modify it. And then what contributors see is a really simple bite sized, complete the first shot, complete the second shot, complete the third shot. They only need to focus on completing the actual teaching. We do all of that on our side. The technology has been built in a way that you get instantaneous combination of shots put together. Is that helpful in terms of this? So this is just high level to some of the templates available on our platform. And there's lots and lots and you can also design your own templates. If you look at these and say these aren't really feasible for me, I want to design something a bit more bespoke to my requirements as well. So let's take a look at the story and who owns the story. We've got different flows. Now, folktale does not own any of the stories. We've got two pathways. Now, let's say you're asking to collect stories from one of your employees. Naturally, if let's say you've got employee engagement and contracts, that will often supersede any of the, you know, in terms of the ownership of the stories themselves. Now, if communities that are not associated with the organization do submit stories, they retain the right to their stories. However, the organization does get a license to use it for the intended purpose. So when you design it, you are being quite intentional to inform contributors. Am I using it internally for purposes of impact measurement? Or am I using it externally? I'm going to be using and broadcasting it more further. And so that consent flow is a decision whether they want to accept or decline that invitation. So different consent flows depending on how you're using it as well. There's a few questions in the chat, but we will need to move on. But I think there's a quick one here that I think would be good if you could answer. Are the videos just one way? Is there an opportunity for interaction? Interaction is being built as we speak. So we are a start-up technology technology. We have a lot of community groups and a whole bunch of micro communities as well. And the answer is yes, yes. I think that's so important. And also remembering that contributions do not need to be simply with the communities or programs. Anybody can contribute. All of us can contribute at any time. So really thinking about who needs to contribute and why. So when you do understand the flow of our platform, it is a great way to understand the flow of our technology. So I hope that's helpful. It was very helpful, Sarah. Thank you so much for presenting about Folktale. And Mel, thank you as well. It was great to hear the case study or studies. And for those of you that if your questions haven't been answered in the chat yet, Sarah or Mel might answer them as we go through. Otherwise, we're going to have to take a few questions. Just before I throw across to Josh, as this is a joint Simna and AES Queensland event, I just wanted to acknowledge our respective co-tears for our different organizing committees who have also joined the session. For the Simna Queensland committee, we're co-teared by David Jack and Rosa Han, who were both here. And I'd also like to thank Mel, who's been co-teared since she was Kim Abbey, but who's also the co-convener of the Australian Evaluation Society Queensland committee. So thank you for those people for supporting the event as well. I'd now like to welcome Josh to talk about Little Phil. As we mentioned earlier, Josh is the current CEO of Little Phil. He's the tech background. So Josh, I've already introduced you before, so I won't do that again. And for those who are interested in finding out more about Josh or Little Phil as he's speaking, I did put the link in the chat earlier as well. So if you can go back through the chat, it'll be somewhere at the start somewhere. So over to you, Josh. Awesome. Thanks for back up and thanks for coming today. So yeah, as mentioned at the start, Little Phil's short for Little Phil Anthropist. We've been building out infrastructure to facilitate impact. So initially started around how we increased trust and transparency and engagement. That's moved a little bit more broader now to unlocking new and alternative streams of fundraising, helping to reduce nonprofits overheads with marketing and content kind of tools. I've designed this presentation to cater for a bit of a mixed audience as it sounds like we had quite a few nonprofits in the audience as well. So yeah, as mentioned, we've been working on Little Phil since 2017. So coming up to six, seven years now, we do quite a bit of work in emerging technologies. So in blockchain, AI and so on. I think this probably sums up for anyone that's in the nonprofit sector or working around those kind of technologies, a little bit of how it sits right now. So there's not many solutions that make it quite simple for especially small to medium organizations. Everything's quite fragmented. Very challenging to kind of put a holistic digital solution together. That's where Little Phil kind of comes into to tidy that all up and make everyone's life a little bit more simple. And then from a visual perspective, this is ideally our goal. So how do we reduce overheads in costs and time for nonprofits? How do we increase transparency and maximize the impact at the end? We work across B2B and B2C. So business to consumer directly through our Little Phil platform. The core stakeholders that we work with are obviously donors, philanthropists, nonprofit organizations, who then by way of being connected to distributing aid and so on, beneficiaries, businesses and brands, and then more into the future, we're working around government and policymakers with data. So for a nonprofit, we've developed an all in one solution, which we refer to as Mission HQ. So how can you launch campaigns, educate donors or potential donors and stakeholders about the work that you're doing, close the loop? So a big thing that we see with the next generation is that they expect to, if you can order a burger on Uber and track it all the way to your house, why if I donate, can I not have some kind of feedback loop of where my money's actually gone and been used and the impact it's created? I'll dive more into a demo. So I think it'll be a bit more powerful to show the platform actually functioning. So after this, I'll dive into more of a demo. Another impact kind of tracking tool for nonprofits specifically would be around share link tracking. So a problem that some of the nonprofits that we work with had brought up was oftentimes they'll have influencers, ambassadors and so on for the organization. They struggle to get them to turn up to events to help with fundraising and so on. However, they're more than willing to be sharing, you know, campaigns and so on. So we've developed a tool that allows a charity in a couple of clicks to create a unique link for any campaign or any influencer, ambassador and so on. And then track click through track conversions and donations and so on. So I'll give a little demo of that after. From a donor perspective we try to integrate all your impact into the one platform. So this is actually live data of my account where you can see that if I make a donation directly through LittlePhil on the platform it'll show here in my impact. If I go to a nonprofit that's using or that's powered by LittlePhil so using our infrastructure so SCUR on the left is an example there, again, it's going to show in my impact. If I go and make a purchase through a store that uses Shopify, so 4.2 million plus e-commerce stores I'll be able to see that in my impact or if I receive giving credits from my employer which I'll go into after this, again we're trying to keep it all in the one interactive impact dashboard. So as I kind of just touched on there around employee credits we've developed a very unique solution for companies to attract and retain employees. And to be able to, I guess kind of track from a data perspective insights around what causes their employees care about have dynamic data around you know the use of funds so an example there would be let's say Westpac gives $10 million a year to CareFlight but they disregard what their 33,000 employees care about our technology effectively allows them to come in and say, okay Rebecca as part of your immigration we give you a thousand bucks a year to donate to whatever you care about. So on a month that can either be one lump sum or on a monthly basis credits are automatically distributed to employees. As the employees donate we're helping kind of bring more awareness potential recurring donations from employees but then also a lot of data for the companies and so on as well. And again this kind of just touches on some of the key benefits around that so obviously around CSR and if you're looking into triple bottom line reporting and so on there's not a huge amount of solutions out there at the moment that really get as granular as what we can get and again all your tax benefits and culture and so on. From a e-commerce perspective so this is really a demonstration of our what's referred to as an API so our infrastructure effectively would allow anyone to build on top so if they had their own idea on how they want to make an impact on nonprofits via financial donations and so on they'd be able to tap into a verified database of nonprofits and basically just use our infrastructure so bypassing the whole process of okay I need to go and verify that this is a legitimate charity and set up accounts and facilitate the transaction or the transactions of actual funding and so on so with this any store that's built on Shopify so as I mentioned 4.2 million around the world we can install our shop and support app so in a few seconds they can select one to three nonprofits and then either a percentage or a dollar amount per sale customer goes through checkout as per normal so there's no potential drop-offs or losing the customer by trying to enforce a donation on the end but after the sale a little pop-up will come up and say Sarah here's the three charities we support which one would you like to give your $2 to so a really great way for brands to engage in giving back and then also from a business perspective you'd be looking at well if you're a savvy marketer in e-commerce you'd be probably putting three very different nonprofits so you get a bit more of an idea on the persona of your customers and so on we work with some of the top experts in the field across Australia so we'll actually be releasing our 2023 status sector research report tomorrow so we'll have another panel at the same time tomorrow I'll put a link in the chat after this if anyone is interested and would like to attend and Rebecca I'm happy to either go directly into demo and do questions in the demo or vice versa I think we've just got a question in the chat from Karen which might be good for you to address this before you go into demonstration and Karen was just asking where the impact data comes for each donation so that's probably easier for me to show you I'll give you a demo the answer in the demo perfect yep so great question we've tried to make the platform much more of a digital native experience so if you imagine the stakeholders here we're looking at a charity dashboard so if I go on click over here I'm actually looking at a live this is a donor dashboard I can come in here and choose any of the campaigns that I like I can make a donation as you can see up the top right there I've got donation credits so my employer gives me credits that I can use and I can either choose to use all of them or part credits and part card I make the donation so again all live data we've got our nice little field good moments so the fireworks going off I can now click through and track my impact so all of this is actually live data we have fundraising campaigns that are either completed or current but if I click into them I can see okay great you know this campaign that I donated to here they exceeded their goal here's what it was for the charities actually come back and put a picture of the hand washing station that they wanted to build with that funding so we've closed the loop on building trust with a donor and so on and we're going to break that down by as flexible as we want we've categorized it in the little field platform as by category so you can see here that my giving is much more tiered towards community but we've also got the data around whether or not we want that to be aligned with the SDGs and so on up the top here so you can see my total impact network giving picture of how we can enable people to make an impact even if they didn't have the funding available to make an impact at the time so basically what that means is if I was to share a link to one of these campaigns it'll set up a unique link that's being tracked and then I can go out to any of my network and say you know what I really want to help fund this playground share it around if anyone's clicking through I can see that if anyone's making a donation I can see that too so it's a way to activate the community and especially younger students and so on who may really want to go out there and help raise funds for something that they're passionate about they just don't have the financial means to do that and to answer your question the charities would be uploading so a message, a picture so on we're encouraging them to do that so that we can educate out of the 60,000 plus nonprofits in Australia what it is you do and to build that trust and close the loop so if we have a quick look from a charity perspective we've got a really simple and easy to digest dashboard so we can go into more detailed reports as well around donors, donation amounts, average donation values etc but the share link tracking is probably the one of the tools that a lot of nonprofits just don't really have access to so an example would be here I can choose whether I want to promote my nonprofit or promote a specific campaign I'm running the type of tracking that I'm doing so am I working with an influencer am I doing a campaign through a blog or through Facebook or so on and then we've left this part flexible enough so that if I wanted to I can come in and set my own kind of precedence around how I want the link to be set up once that's generated I can now so just to explain what I'm doing I'm going to go to that link through a private browser which will replicate a new user or donor going through I'll replicate doing a donation through that link so I've already got a card added so within a couple of taps I can make a donation if I come back here now I can now see that the donations gone through the channel and so on so I would be able to focus more of my time and effort from an impact perspective on using the channels that are converting the best for me probably a little bit more of a marketing tool but still quite powerful I think I'm getting pretty close to my time now but happy to go back to answer any questions from here great thanks Josh every time I see this I get more and more excited about it it looks so I just really like how it looks really really clean I can see how it'd be really useful we've got some real curly questions warm up for you Josh some curly questions in the correct Q&A but some really good ones I'll go back to Karen she's asked about one of my favourite topics which is about preventing impact washing and you touched a little bit about this already but is there a way of verifying how the money is actually being spent our charity is doing what they say they're going to do with it yeah great question so on that we've been developing some solutions around blockchain which is the track and traceability of funding to be honest majority of nonprofits especially in Australia are barely at what's referred to as web 2 yet so trying to bring them up to web 3 I think we're still a little way away the US is a little bit different but in Australia at least that's what we're seeing to prevent impact washing so ideally the platform is set up so that if you're launching a campaign it's one it's not to go and raise millions of dollars for a campaign it's so that you can get the word out there about what your organisation does cut through the noise because you're now competing not only against 60,000 registered in Australia but millions around the world so why does anyone know or why should they care about your organisation so okay great it's your opportunity to have a little kind of billboard there if you're not closing that feedback loop so providing pictures and so on then the donors that have come through there the chance that they'll give to you again is much lower so the whole systems designed around that closing of the loop and so on from a I think I can see another one in there around what impact means an issue that we have kind of seen with some of the impact reporting specifically in donation space is that it can be biased so an example there would be we work with two different charities they both work with kids one works with kids from so orphans from abandoned drug addicts and prostitutes the others just disadvantaged children so if you're looking into overheads on those two different charities and you're applying certain methodologies on how you assess the use of funding obviously the first one that's much more high needs is not looking as great so some of the existing frameworks we don't believe are great or work in that respect yeah but you're on mute I think that's thanks Josh and just another question there from Mary Jane as well which is about the corporate giving can it be from the pre-tax salary rather than the organisation contribution per employee and then yeah a second question about overlaying with ticketing platforms like Humanity Centre is that right perfect yeah they're definitely avenues that we're looking into at the moment so anywhere where there's a transaction effectively could have impact or embed impact and that percentage can then come straight through the infrastructure of the technology so yeah 100% at the moment it's not hooked up but definitely that's kind of where we're headed right thanks Josh are there and nice comment there from Rose just that tech doesn't watch impact people watch impact very true rise thanks if anyone can't see Rose's comment please have a look at that very good point well thank you so much Josh as I mentioned before Josh is sticking around so if there's any further questions that you have for Josh please for free to keep them putting them in the chat and there'll be an opportunity at the end and as I mentioned before to Josh's contact details and little fill as well website link is in the chat if you scroll all the way back to the start thank you so much Josh and Josh is very happy for people to get in contact with him as well if you want to talk specifically about how this might work for your your organisation and what you need to measure I'd like to now welcome Luke Everett from Torch and before I do that I keep getting to acknowledge people but I wanted to acknowledge Laura Glyn who's executive officer for Simna who's my co-host for today and who's doing a lot of work in the background so thank you very much Laura so Luke over to you and we look forward to hearing about Torch great thanks everyone for joining I know I've spoken to some groups before but it's good also to get a bit of a refresher so the founding team for project AO I guess came from a group of monitoring and evaluation and economists people working in information technology myself software development and then cyber security and IT governance I think this is going to be an area where people have to be a lot more knowledgeable and informed as we stop working with these different governments in the field and that sort of thing so we wanted to make sure that we had that experience especially capturing sensitive data and those sorts of things we also mostly come from the international development background so if a lot of that sort of comes through I know there's lots of domestic teams as well but that's sort of where things started and really what we wanted to do was streamline and standardize the process for teams to initially build their theory of change how can we sort of help teams build their theory of change approach most effectively and then give some tools along that path to reduce the friction to sort of automate some of that data flow and more teams were starting to use BI tools and sort of build more real-time dashboards and we wanted to take that technical requirement away from needing to do that as well so we started with helping teams in those ways and now we've sort of expanded the platform to make it a little bit more flexible you don't have to use say for example the theory of change approach you can use your own hierarchies and that sort of thing which we can go through okay so we're looking to maybe not replace in some areas we would like to but we're talking about online survey tools teams using spreadsheets document reports presentations to build their theories of change or teams that can spend a lot of money on purpose built MIS's and the business intelligence platforms that I mentioned before so what do we do so we are an online platform to manage your entire mail process from theory of change development all the way through reporting and stakeholder engagement as I mentioned before you can customize your approach to be based on the theory of change approach or logframes or impact models business plans anything like that it even doesn't need to necessarily be a specific structure you can you can customize it to be really specified for smaller projects within a program those sorts of things and really what we want to do with standardized the approach a little bit so people are using common language they're going from one program to another they don't have to understand how this team builds a theory of change you know what what tools and systems they use what timelines time frames they use those sorts of things so that it's a little bit more approachable when you're you're moving between programs as well because it's online everything's real-time collaboration and from anywhere where there's an internet connection it's really low bandwidth we wanted to make sure that it can be used in team or less they're just as well as it does in Brisbane for example and that it's easy enough for anyone to use you can be a finance officer you can be a mail consultant you can be an investment manager in a donor and you'll be able to use it without any other sort of technical skills you might need for BI tools or all those sorts of things we're really hoping with torch to break down some of those data silos getting rid of some of these really large Excel documents and stuff that sit on people's hard drives and sort of have data gatekeepers we want to make sure that everyone sort of has access to the data that they need and that comes down also to the evaluation process reducing the work needed to transpose data from one data set to another or to put it into a report that then goes to another team that they then take that data down into their own data sets for use all those sort of things and also improving the relationship between quantitative and qualitative data as well when we talk about quant data where there's trends over time how do we attach qualitative context to that so that when we're doing reports later on we already have that information in one place so here's an example of how we sort of start to think about the structure of say our theories of change you can customize it take different layers out put new ones in include instruction sets that can be used in the wizard which I'll show later on and assign those different hierarchy levels color codes so in the diagrams that we automatically generate they're sort of themed to how you would expect your theory of change to look we have a number of indicator types and this is really how the basis of torch functions it's built around your project and your theory of change and then your indicators attach to the different elements directly so that any data that flows through the system is already related in the way that you would expect for your theory of change so you've got your qual and quant indicators also status indicators really good for specific activities and then financial indicators as well which I'll go into a bit more detail later you know we make it really easy to define these indicators with all the different data fields that you would expect when you want to report back to clients and stakeholders you know if someone else comes into the system you can also set your impact measurement plan for example that all the data is is there ready to go these indicators can also be assigned to an individual team or user so that when an indicator comes up for needing data capture they're going to be alerted and notified that that indicator is coming up in the next month for example and that's all customizable so that you can send out those reminders the way that we link and I'll talk a little bit more about this later but we also have a tagging system within Torch to tag indicators say as a KPI or a common indicator or priority indicators so that you can relate them in different ways to our automated dashboards you might have multiple projects spread across the region and you want to have their own project reporting in country and then feeding that data back to the central dashboard or project the tags so I was just saying about the disaggregations so making sure that people understand what data should be expected at any of these points in time really make sure that when you go to write reports and there's sorts of things that there aren't big gaps in those data sets or that you know we haven't thought about disaggregation groups so then this is really quick but once you've got your indicators set up you then can set targets against those disaggregations and record results one of the really key parts for us is being able to record results online or via an import so you can download a template from Torch saying sorry about that it's really testing me today um so I don't know where we got to was this slide right Rebecca yeah I think you just yeah I think you're just about to move on from here actually okay yeah so I was just talking about the certification process so teams in the field can record results they can be QAID centrally and then only once they've been QAID and approved will lay appear in any dashboards or reports or anything like that and this is a really great way to sort of have people on the front line record those results and then still have that level of checks as well and you know there's a role-based security process through the whole platform so teams can have access to a single project to the whole platform and that can be set up on a project by project basis as well so indicators so results can be captured qualitatively or quantitatively obviously but then we also have the ability to add additional narrative explanatory text priority information and ratings to it this is really good for things like VFM assessments where you might have a core set of indicators that are tagged with you know ethics economy efficiency for example um sub tags and then go through and rate them based on your criteria or matrix but it's all attached to the one set of results so when you go back and look at those you can see where those ratings came from why they were there and those sorts of things and there's different visualization configuration for those to pull them separately to your quantitative results we create a set of diagrams for you automatically and we also have a diagram generator a diagram builder that you can customize it to the way you want to but really what we want to do here is any changes within the diagram generator automatically filters through to your overall theory of change element descriptions those sorts of things and vice versa so where any changes go throughout the system it's automatically replicated everywhere else so you don't have to then go oh I need to go and update that diagram or now I need to make sure my impact measurement plan is up to date it's all it's all within the one system and this is a really good way to do project health um checks as well you can use the overview diagram and we overlay status markers across each of the different elements so that you can see where activities or outputs might be falling behind they might be at risk etc and have those conversations with stakeholders using that as a basis this is just the diagram generator I was mentioning before the overview obviously doesn't show any attribution or contribution but then when you dump into the actual diagram editor you can also then adjust it any of the attributions or see them and make all changes to the relationship model that way and this is really important for things like the financial indicators anywhere within your theory of change or your approach you can look at a specific element and see which financial indicators are contributing to those and have those financial results flow up so that you can see your impact metrics against your financial results the impact insights um this is the dashboarding system so this is at the project level we also have a tenant level one as well and this is really where you start to customize some of these visualizations so you can see here as an example we have a VFM dashboard that's pulling results from a specific project and showing them in the gauges and then showing that over time and that's fully customizable and what we do here is we use standard mel terminology to build these out we don't talk about you know raising a database or x and y values for say line graphs etc really what we're doing is just saying which data sets which indicators and disaggregations do i want to display and which visualization do i want to use for from start to finish date and it will do the rest it's going to go out and build those out for you so the other part of this is the automatic drill down so when you build out a card in any of our dashboards you automatically also get drill down so you can click on one you can see then it's going to show it by this is a card of four different projects contributing to a single common indicator and you can see which projects are contributing which amounts by what percentage by disaggregation category and by disaggregation type so you can see sort of where you might be missing data where you know certain groups are misrepresented etc and then you can drill through further into the actual detailed results as well to see what the actual values are overall so then other parts of the system that we haven't really covered is document management so you can upload documents as evidence to any results or to the project itself this is really good for collaborating with evaluators and that sort of thing where you want to put like the annual plan, the annual report together for a project they might not be a member of the team specifically but they can see the torch documentation that you've put in there if you want for that QA process for results you can upload any survey results or any of that sort of stuff as backing evidence for that we talked about the user access controls we also have version controls and variation support so you can go in and create a new variation of a project model it out see how it's going to work and then present that back to stakeholders and then choose one of those variations or forecasts as your new core project and this is really good for showing the evolution of a project from start to finish a program might go for 8, 10 years how do we see the evolution over time through the theory of change and through the approach we've got project templates built in so we have our own set based on change approach etc which you can use or you can create an organizational template so if you have lots of smaller programs with cut down theories of change you could build a template and then just reuse it over and over we've got survey tools so you can build a survey with your disaggregation details and then the system on an ongoing basis can automatically aggregate and record results for those disaggregations over time so you can imagine you know an end of program survey or initiative survey goes out and every quarter we'll just capture those results against those disaggregation sets and the good thing about that as well is any time you change a disaggregation set in torch it's automatically going to update your surveys so you don't have to then go all we added stuff into the impact measurement plan we need to now update all of our surveys it will do that automatically for you so just two quick case studies to put this into a little bit of context so this first one was a was a volunteer program and what they wanted to do was run a VFM assessment across their existing indicator set so the team went in and either tagged a set of indicators with relevant VFM categories or added a few extras as needed and then went through the existing results and scored them based on their criteria matrix and straight away was able to then visualize those in the dashboard so that was really a quick way for them to do that rather than having to go and reinvent the theory of change again for the VFM assessment and do it all again from scratch the second one is a private sector program that's tracking multiple interventions individually they have their own business plans built in to torch as their own project their partners then record results on an ongoing basis and then their QA centrally and then aggregated and reported with key indicators so some programs, some projects have their own indicator set but then they're sort of translated through torch into a set of common indicators and the key outcome for this was that it really reduced the time it took them to do any reporting because it was monitored on an ongoing basis when they went to do the reports all that data was already QA it was already in one place they could just go and grab those visualizations put them into the report and include the context the contextual narrative with any of those changes so this is just a bit of a sneak peek of what's next so we want to take that impact measurement plan which is automatically generated and build the work plans as well so each team will be able to see visually what data needs to be captured when and if it's overdue we're looking to do more data capture integrations with financial systems and those sorts of things data can be automatically pulled through into those indicators more detailed reporting which we haven't shown today GIS visualizations is another big one how do we take that disaggregated data and visualize it for GIS project benchmarking and lessons learn and recommendations so the more data we have for programs the more we'll be able to say you know for similar programs with standard with similar goal statements or impact statements how can we sort of share some of those lessons learned with teams that are spending more money in certain activities but not seeing as good results potentially and sort of start to fine tune some of those approaches or help guide some of those impact outcomes evaluative questions it's an area where we haven't really looked at yet how do we best take those evaluative questions every year and give a compelling data to put them together and also improve our survey system so that you can send the same surveys to the same participants on an ongoing basis track if they've actually recorded them and reported back so that you can see the same survey filled out over and over and then what those results look like over time for longitudinal studies and stuff and then we're also developing at the moment an organizational or donor level platform which will connect to multiple torch tenants and enable you to aggregate data up from there so each project can be its own ecosystem or environment but then pull that up for more portfolio or country level reporting on common indicators at the organizational level okay I think that's everything that I wanted to go through so we have any questions thank you so much Luke that was great and well done going through the Wi-Fi difficulties as well like a pro you knew exactly how to write that out and I don't think we've got any questions in the chat so what I might do is invite Sarah Josh to join us back with Luke and Luke if I could maybe just ask you to stop sharing your screen and just open the floor to any other questions if you do have a question please feel free to put your hand up and I will try and see you or else you can put another question in the chat if you have anything else for the speakers just while we're waiting people to think of any questions just some great feedback there Luke from David for you really comprehensive solution and I think for the techie evaluators you can see a lot of us getting into the detail there as well I'm sure David loves it too so look if there are any other questions I'd just like to extend a thank you from Sarah and AES to Sarah to Luke and Josh as well as Sarah's colleague as well who's Mel thank you very much for presenting your different solutions today obviously a lot of interest from the members of Simna and AES and the non-members as well who have joined us today I'll just double check there's no other questions there are some great just a question from Rose to everybody thanks Rose did any of you involve end users service recipients in the design of your platforms if so did their thoughts differ from other stakeholders so Luke can I maybe invite you to answer that question I mean we work with end users every day to fine tune the requirements and reporting and data flow and all those sorts of things I think across the different donors definitely their requirements differ a little bit and that's where we sort of had to fine tune our customizations and approach but throughout our whole process from designing a feature all the way through to deployment and QA we're always getting feedback from our current our current users to make sure that any design briefs are representative of what they're actually asking for will it work in the context they work with and how do we fine tune that and make sure that any improvements do fit the vast majority sometimes they're not going to and in those cases we have made customization specific for those deployments but the idea is to make it as low cost for teams as possible so we try and make sure that we're improving it for everyone for those requirements at the same time thanks Luke and Josh did you want to comment at all in terms of the involvement of particularly the end users in your platform? Yeah so if you're referring to service recipients as in say the beneficiaries in our case we probably said more under a charity or organization then yes we've got further designs around finance and banking so if you imagine that some of our nonprofits that we work with are international aid they'll work in countries abroad where they may not have banking or great financial infrastructure so we've been designing around that but it can be a little bit challenging we sit at the top sector level and then you've got different I guess service beneficiaries under each segment or industry under the whole sector but if you're not doing that and you're not designing around that I think you're probably not doing your job properly Yeah it's okay isn't it Josh? Definitely. And I think we've just got and Sarah has of course answered the question in the chat was there anything else you wanted to mention on that Sarah live are you happy to? Mel I think perhaps you wanted to start in terms of answering. Yeah I was just going to say I was the customer first so I was one of the early customers a couple years ago and we piloted it in a COVID response setting across different countries and I guess while I've ended up coming into the fold later down the track is we were doing quarterly sorry fortnightly zoom check-ins with participants but all learning it together and a number of feedback that came direct has now now exists in the infotail so I have really appreciated the learning posture and developing it to really be participant led genuinely so that was alignment was really key and why I probably ended up a few years later here trying to translate it to different organizations as somebody who had to go through that yeah And then more broadly because you know similar to the other applications we are product led right in terms of understanding of the key priorities so it's really important like we've got some really incredible champions and customers that we work with and depending on which type of role you play we're constantly getting feedback from all of them and you know it's the emergence of folk to the academy that was because of contributors that were getting trained on folktale and after 12 months of working together they were so proud they said can we actually print out some certificates to say that we know folktale now like we know Excel or Canva or PowerPoint and we're like hey we need to probably make an academy around this so that was really led by the folks that we work with amongst many other parts of the platform That's a great example Sarah Well we might close it there so I always say that Queensland is the best state for social impact measurement and of course we've got the best impact measurement tools and platforms as well so and thank you again Luke, Josh and Sarah and thank you for those of you that have joined us this