The Power of Evidence: How Research Can Benefit Non-Profits and Their Stakeholders

By Suma Perumal, Research and Design Lead

Situated in the semi-urban localities of Trichy is a Corporation Higher Secondary School. The school is home to several thousand dreams and aspirations of students, who come from varied socio-economic backgrounds. Within the school is placed Radha, a driven educator, who represents a non-profit organisation that works towards enabling school heads to make their schools child-centric.

Over the course of her interactions with students, she noted that the students’ reading levels were low. In a zeal to address this issue, she went to discuss the issue with the school’s headmaster, Mr. Ramesh. During their conversation, she suggested having library periods for students during school hours based on her success in using stories and anecdotes to grab their attention.

Mr. Ramesh, then, mentioned that students\’ movement from the academic block to the library would make it difficult for the teachers to manage them. Quoting discipline as a concern, they collectively agreed to enable substitute teachers  to distribute storybooks in their classrooms. Radha, being the curious person she is, assessed the students\’ reading levels, before starting this practice in classrooms. 

Image Source : https://www.science.org/content/article/how-grad-school-assignment-led-me-career-investigating-research-misconduct

Although this practice was followed across the school, she noted that only 1/4th of the students participated in reading the storybooks. This, she felt, might be because the teachers continued with their personal work after distributing the books. Three months later, she conducted another assessment to evaluate students’ reading levels. This reflected considerable improvement, particularly among students who were highly engaged in reading storybooks. Overjoyed with the results, she shared them with Mr. Ramesh. 

He paused for a moment and turned to Radha to say, “If this small attempt has had an impact on students, then I think it’s time to engage them in the library. As you mentioned before, we can have teachers take them to the library during school hours. Additionally, we can ensure teachers assist them in the reading process. From next year on, I will add weekly 2 hours of mandatory library time in the timetable.”

She was amazed at how Mr. Ramesh initiated an activity that he had said no to three months back! “Power of evidence,” she thought to herself.

Decoding evidence and research

When jargon such as “evidence” or “research” is used, it is generally associated with academics or considered something complex. However, it is important to note that collecting evidence and doing research is a process that all non-profits engage in knowingly or unknowingly. 

We may not have presented a paper at a conference, but we sure have told our funders about the rationale behind our practices. We may have a standard operating procedure to work with our clients in the organisation. This may be based on what worked and what did not, over the course of our interactions with them. Before we standardised them, we may have checked if there are other people who followed similar practices to check if we’re on the right track. 

To summarise, our “evidence” could be numbers, testimonials, shifts in actions or even in perspectives! Now that we have a lot of data evidence that supports our work, research comes in to help we make sense of it.

A conscious effort to understand our data in a local and global context is all it takes for us to include research in our organisation.

Why research for Non-Profits?

It is common to think of needing data and research when presenting an idea, rationale or our own work to the external world. But, do you think research is more than just that? This was one question Vidhya Vidhai Foundation was grappling with.

While research did help project our organisation’s work to funders, beneficiaries and a larger audience, it also informed our own practice. This meant, we get a detailed picture of what worked best for us, what is something we could improve upon and informed if our current processes are as effective as we intended. In short, research provided a space for us to reflect on our own work and thrive for better.

One step further, when we collected evidence from our schools and then did our research, we were able to adopt a bottom-up approach. This gave our stakeholders and beneficiaries the power to decide what worked best for them.

That is, this allowed us to customise our solutions based on the needs of the people we worked with. 

While we recognize the benefits of research for various stakeholders, we were also able to consider how other non-profit organizations can benefit from it. We recognized the potential impact of validating our own best practices and sharing them with our peers.

This makes it possible for them to replicate your successful model, potentially benefiting millions of people beyond your current reach.

Did you find this article insightful? As a first step in our journey, we could try to map the type of non-profit we are and decide our strategy to incorporate research. Here is one such article that could help you do that- https://ssir.org/articles/entry/why_indian_nonprofits_are_experts_at_scaling_up