The MTV Staying Alive Foundation (MTV-SAF) produces the highly engaging serial drama, MTV-Shuga, that has audiences from 72 countries—including Databoom staff—glued to their screens. MTV-Shuga is an ingenious multi-award-winning behavior change campaign that addresses topics like family planning, STI prevention, HIV and AIDs, safe and legal abortions, and gender-based violence through captivating story arches, secret love triangles, and intrigue.
MTV-SAF uses evidence to fuel its groundbreaking and life-changing content. Staff use data to create content, monitor audience reach, and evaluate changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. Data were, however, housed in different places, inconsistently digitized, and not always comparable. This made it difficult for the MTV-SAF team to triangulate data, draw insights from evidence, and inform decision-making.
That’s where Databoom came in! We teamed up with our data visualization partner, Visualst, and MTV-SAF to create a user-friendly data management system and digitized dashboards to improve MTV-SAF’s use of evidence for decision-making.
The result? Appealing and user-friendly dashboards have made data more accessible—and less intimidating—for staff to use. Timely analytics allow MTV-SAF to compare data from different country campaigns over time and to adapt programming as needed. Now MTV-SAF is thinking differently about communicating evidence to evaluation partners, how audiences consume campaigns, better ways to triangulate data, and aligning formative research with monitoring and evaluation efforts.
To learn more about this work, check out our case study and tune into our fully recorded session from the 2021 Global Development Summit (GDD Summit)—complete with a demo of the digital dashboards! And if you get caught binging on MTV-Shuga, remember, we warned you!
