Monitoring for Stronger Strategies
A strategy that is not informed by data is no strategy at all. Every single unit and team in Honeyguide uses data to monitor their activities, evaluating our impact and informing our progress towards our goals. This data also provides feedback that can be used to adapt our programs to drive better performance, helping us focus on program outputs rather than inputs. Mobile technology and innovative data collection methods support our work and allow the management team to make evidence-based strategic decisions.
Tools of the Trade
Since 2017, Honeyguide has been implementing and refining an internal monitoring system that tracks indicators of success for all Honeyguide’s project areas. The system collects over 200 data points to measure program impact in our four primary project areas as well as our special projects.
Honeyguide updates its monitoring tool quarterly, measuring each data point against its respective baseline. This helps inform management, partners, and donors of results and progress towards our overarching goals. For Honeyguide, data is increasingly central to the way we work, and is a reflection of our results-oriented culture.
SMART Conservation
Organizations throughout the world have adopted SMART conservation software to improve management of natural resources and wildlife. Honeyguide now uses SMART, along with related apps, to guide our programs. This enables a wide range of new analysis, such as quickly uncovering new poaching trends and gaps in wildlife protection. Using this information, team commanders can adapt their patrol routes and protection strategies.
Innovation & Development
At Honeyguide, we have a team of young professionals who are constantly seeking new solutions to complex problems – whether by developing apps to better track tourism revenue or simply looking at the poaching crisis through the eyes of communities.
Our team values technology’s ability to make our processes more efficient and impactful. We are always looking for new, innovative software—including from partner organizations—which can improve how our team works.
Collaboration and Sharing
Honeyguide is a partner in the Northern Tanzania Rangelands Initiative (NTRI), which is a collaboration of 9 organizations working together in over 20,000 sq km which includes the Tarangire ecosystem. NTRI combines the strengths, skills, and experiences of partners from different sectors in one platform, thus improving coordination, resource mobilization, information sharing, and monitoring & evaluation (M&E). Honeyguide shares data for the NTRI dashboard—an M&E tool with shared indicators for all participating organizations—in order to enable Honeyguide and its NTRI partners to understand the larger context within which they are working.