Foundations
Gemeinnützige Hertie-Stiftung · doing.politics
“What holds young people back from running for political office – and how can we support them on their path into politics?”
The project
As the doing.politics network continues to grow, understanding how its members develop and what they need becomes increasingly important: What motivates them to take on political responsibility? What obstacles do they face? Which experiences help them move forward – and how can doing.politics best support them?
Rather than asking just a handful of individuals, the doing.politics team wants to involve current participants and the entire alumni network across different cohorts. Researchers at Zeitgeist Labs work closely with the team to develop a methodologically rigorous approach to data collection and analysis. Drawing on current research, they bring together the existing impact framework, a qualitative interview guide, and appropriate data collection methods. A purpose-built voice assistant is used to conduct personal, context-aware qualitative interviews.
The Intelligence Dashboard then brings these individual conversations together to form a comprehensive picture of the network. The analysis allows the team to explore similarities and differences across the community and identify potential opportunities to improve its programs and alumni engagement.
Zeitgeist Labs has integrated the impact framework used by doing.politics into the dashboard as a dedicated layer of analysis. This allows the team to interpret the evidence gathered in relation to its own impact goals and track how that evidence develops with each additional conversation. The team can interact with these findings to bring the community’s voice into the planning of events, the development of programs, and strategic decisions.
Through Zeitgeist Labs’ studies, we gain in-depth perspectives from a much broader range of people across our network – insights we previously couldn’t capture in this way through standardized questionnaires or occasional personal conversations. The subsequent structured analysis and presentation make these findings directly useful to us.
A major step forward for our impact measurement is the integration of our impact framework into the dashboard. This allows us to link the insights from the interviews directly to our impact goals and assess them systematically. In the Intelligence Dashboard, we can explore these findings and use them to further develop our programs in a targeted way. This is how we bring our community’s voice into important decisions.