Knowledge for Development

Knowledge is power. This just means that informed people can make more targeted decisions. Also in the social sector, knowledge is a key to professionalization. That's why we are developing knowledge for collaborative aid development projects.

• Abstract
• Current Activities
• Data Resources (coming soon)
• Methodology (coming soon)

Abstract

With our knowledge for development study, we provide decision-relevant knowledge on topics of development aid to all of our betterplace.org users. We directly address both project supporters and managers so that we can help potential donors to target their giving goals more efficiently and to support the best possible projects. We want to provide project managers with practical information on how to create more efficient initiatives.

Knowledge for Development – nicknamed "Know 4 Dev" – is a long-term project. We build knowledge portals from our studies and integrate them onto the betterplace.org platform, featuring scientific and practical expert interviews as well as cooperatations with businesses. This project is a learning process for us as well as for our users. Each time we build a portal, we evaluate what we can improve the next time around in order to make the given knowledge even more accessible to our users.

New information, prepared and relevant for the social sector

We plan to publish several informational guides on development aid topics. The information provided should help in decision-making and in application to project work. We place high priority on the quality and objectivity of our compiled knowledge. Our potential partners in developing this information are research institutes, universities, editors, organizations, project managers, beneficiaries and, of course, our own users.

Our central question focuses on how to prepare complex topics in an interesting and simple way, so that it can reach a broad spectrum of users. We are testing various presentation methods to observe reactions and the effect on user-decisions. Such methods include articles, graphics, videos, interactive quizzes, expert interviews, comments, wiki-texts or topic-specific collections of links and blogs.

Besides finding the best way to prepare and present our knowledge, we are also testing the optimal intersection of our knowledge portal with the betterplace.org platform. In which form, and on which pages is our knowledge most useful? Fine-tuning our communication strategies with the betterplace community as well as in a public community is a further challenge.

Current Activities

For World Water Day on 22. March 2010, we put together a Knowledge Portal Water Portal. This pilot project was done in cooperation with the research group Getidos as well as with the Internet platform AidConnect. (See lab partners).

The water knowledge portal aimed at engaging all project managers and supporters whose work involves water. At the time of the knowledge portal lauch, five percent of the over 2,800 projects on betterplace.org were related to the topic of water.

The Water Portal is divided into three categories:Drinking Water & Sanitation, Water & Food and Water & Nature. We published four expert interviews and ten case studies, all of them offering a perspective into the most pressing problems and current examples of possible solutions concerning water.

Alongside the water portal, we prepared checklists for each category that can be used by potential project supporters to check the quality and impact of projects that they may wish to support, and to be able to ask important questions directly to project managers. We've placed the checklists on the right hand side of each category in the water portal.

We used the water portal checklists to develop general checklists that can be used as tools for mindful social investing