I have often thought of the impact of tech-for-good projects in terms of numbers — the number of users, downloads, visits, or contributions. For a long time, I steered clear of monitoring and evaluation because my impression of it was very numbers-driven. But my recent experience of conducting a qualitative assessment of a disaster reporting platform in Indonesia and the Philippines reminded me that numbers tell only part of the story. What completes this story are sometimes feelings, shifts, or experiences that ripple through a community.

I’ve had a bias for qualitative methods, but this experience reaffirmed why. It allowed me to capture what I care about more — experiences, feelings, behaviours, and the meanings that individuals assign to them. In one of the interviews, a schoolteacher described how her feeling of fear and panic shifted to feeling calm and composed when disasters struck. This shift encouraged her to talk about the platform with other teachers, and eventually with students. She even shared how her students were now able to identify and report blocked roads, and find alternative routes to school during disaster events. If measured through a purely quantitative lens, this might have shown up as “one user.” But the shift in feelings, and its ripple effects across peers and students, would have been lost. And this was just one story — there were many others about shared resilience, solidarity, people taking agency of their safety and supporting each other in new ways. This study helped me uncover not just how much the platform was used, but the how and why behind its adoption — the motivations, meanings, and connections that drove people to use it and share it further. These small, often invisible changes are what help us make sense of broader shifts in community resilience and preparedness.

The process, though, was not easy. Talking about disasters is never simple; people carry memories and vulnerabilities that are not always easy to voice. I had hours of conversations to make sense of — fragments of stories and heavy emotions. The challenge was to shape it into something coherent, that could carry to readers a glimpse of what I had heard and experienced.

In the beginning, my codes looked messy, pulled straight from the interview guides — Empowerment and control, Favourite features, Hopes, Process of development, Sense of community, Resilience, Challenges, and so on. Over time, with repeated iterations, patterns began to emerge. Codes condensed into themes, and themes into larger storylines. Instead of headings like “impact” or “implementation,” the report began to take shape around phrases that reflected the interviewees’ voices: From Panic to Empowerment, Cultivating Communities of Response, Cultural Foundations of Resilience, Ripple Effects Beyond Disaster Preparedness. These captured not only people’s words but also the essence of what they had lived.

This experience helped me think about impact differently. It showed me how qualitative methods allow us to return to the questions we start our proposals with: How will someone’s life change because of this project? Such assessments push us to focus on the intangible, long-term shifts that programs usually aspire to, but that can often get lost in implementation and measurement.

For me, the success of an initiative ultimately lies in how deeply it is woven into people’s everyday lives. And that kind of change is usually a gradual process. It starts with small, gradual shifts — in how someone feels, in what they do, in the stories they carry forward. Over time, those shifts ripple outward, quietly but powerfully shaping the bigger change we hope to see. Looking at impact qualitatively is a way of recognising that change takes time, and that it can’t always be captured in the short-term. If programs were designed and assessed this way, they might place more value on people’s lived experiences, and the ecosystem as a whole could shift towards valuing and incentivising deeper, more lasting change!

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If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts and have a conversation!

Write to me at [email protected]

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