The key to successful data organization is preparation. As you roll out your own project, we suggest keeping track of the following:

• Photos: These will remind you of the various ways information is getting shared on the ground in your community and will serve as inspiration for your engagement strategies throughout the project. See examples from Baltimore here.
• An ongoing list of community topics: As described in the playbook, prior to engaging with your community you will survey your community and determine what issues, concerns, or topics may be of Importance or relevance to potential participants. Make a list of these findings and keep it accessible. As you begin to map out and plan your approach to engage the community with questions, your list of issues concerns topics will be the baseline of your organizational approach. For more tips on crafting questions please see the ^{Guide to Asking Good Questions (PDF ↓)}. 
• Survey results: Your survey will uncover important topics, ways that people receive and exchange information, and who they trust. After completing the survey, write up an executive summary of your findings. This will continue to inform your project design throughout implementation.
• Contact management: Your participants are the most important focus when building a community engagement project. Make sure that you collect contact information in a formalized manner that will allow you to grow your list and reach out efficiently. Many SMS platforms/services offer Contact Management Software (CSM). For more information on SMS platforms, see our ^{SMS Guide (PDF ↓)}.
• Questions asked: Keep track of the questions you ask your community. You can do this in the Keep Organized template attached. When tracking questions on your data collection sheet, we suggest tagging each question with a topic under which you can collate all responses, stories, conversations and other materials. This will help you track your topics and trends over time.
• Community responses: You will be receiving community responses from a number of different channels (SMS, audio, social media, in-person). Organize this information together, this is your rich community content. Tips for organizing this data can be found in the tips section below
• Community engagement methods and results: How are you reaching out to people and asking questions? How many responses do you receive per outreach method?Collecting this information each week will help you refine your outreach methods and tune into what resonates with your community. 
• Content created: What content has your Listening Post project produced or contributed to the production of by any of the partners (media, bloggers, other content creators) in your network of partners? Keep track of this important content.
• Learning and results: Has your engagement produced any new initiatives or dynamics in your community or changed your own organizational approach? Track this learning and share it with our community so that we can all improve our work.

Keeping it together:

We recommend organizing your incoming data and responses by topical folders and subfolders. These folders will contain a general aggregation of all data collected for each question within the duration of the project. A folder structure might look like this again, with all materials associated with a given question located within the subfolders:

Top Folder- Government

• Subfolder 1- Question 4.22.17- Mayors Wish List
  
• Subfolder 2- Question 5.12.17- Voting Registration
  
• Subfolder 3- Question 6.24.17- What Would You Ask City Council
  

Want to learn from all the data you are collecting? Here are some tips on how you can organize and analyze data to inform your project.

The following items are meant to provide a basic foundation for analysis in the absence of other analytic tools that may be available. Many SMS platforms in particular provide robust analytic utilities ^{(SMS Guide PDF ↓)}, but if you are not using such a platform or if you want to do a baseline analysis on participant contributions such as audio or in-person interviews, you may find these suggestions useful.

These are columns or items you can add to your original template to support your data analysis process:

• Completed responses —This figure specifies how many times participants answered each of the questions within a given post (only applicable to posts that contain more than one question).
• Completed responses to participants’ ratio — divide the number of completed responses by the number of unique participants to get a ratio that illustrates what percentage of participants took the time to answer each of the questions you posed within a given post.
• Average number of responses per participant — This figure shows how many times participants are responding to posts with multiple questions. Ideally this figure should be compared with the number of questions within the post to gauge the level of participation.
• Quits — this figure simply shows how many respondents indicated that they are no longer interested in participating in the project or initiative. Posts that contain a high number of quits should be closely analyzed to determine what could have been done differently. Note that certain topics (such as children/education) may not appeal to all respondents. Quits apply in particular to SMS engagement as it is unlikely that someone being interviewed or contributing audio or social media information would quit during the process of relaying feedback. However, should that occur, it’s important to ask the participant why they are declining to participate further so that you can gather information regarding how better to engage your community in the future
• Level of engagement — this can be somewhat subjective, but can give you a good idea of which posts are generating the most engagement. Read the responses and other inputs that you’ve collected to gather a loose impression of just how often participants are contributing valuable feedback. Those posts that are deemed to have high engagement (as opposed to medium or low), should be further scrutinized in an effort to determine what exactly resonated with the participants. It can be the question type, the topic or other variables that should be noted and remembered for follow-up questions or lessons learned as they pertain to other posts.
• Notes — It’s a good idea to jot down some thoughts or takeaways from posts while they’re still fresh in your head. As posts accumulate, it’s easy to lose track of which posts really worked as well as details regarding the participant responses. You might consider adding information regarding individual contributions for follow up or news stories that might be created down the road.