256 – The Parenting Programme Facilitator Apps

[00:00:07] Michele: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. I am Michele Pancera, I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi, David.

[00:00:18] David: Hi, Michele. Really interested to talk today about our parenting work because this is something you’ve got sucked into, you are doing, and it’s one where within the podcast episodes we’ve neglected and we haven’t talked about it enough. So I’m keen to start some of these discussions and put maybe some of the work you’ve been doing into a broader context.

[00:00:44] Michele: This is also a very important part of what IDEMS is doing, and the relationship that we have with PLH. So yeah, let’s dig into that.

I have been working since the start of my job here at IDEMS with the open app builder, trying to learn what it is and how it works. And our main application is concerning PLH projects on parenting.

[00:01:15] David: Where PLH stands for Parenting for Lifelong Health, and it is both a consortium, if you want, but also a UK based charity now.

[00:01:25] Michele: We mainly have two branches of apps that we are developing for PLH. One is called the parenting apps, and the other one is called the facilitator apps. And those are both thought of as supports, one for parents and the other for facilitators for programmes that PLH is organising in various countries. The latest ones, just a few that might be worth mentioning, are Curaçao, Malaysia, Mexico, and many others actually.

[00:02:03] David: And what’s interesting actually is that the ones you’ve chosen to mention really are the facilitator apps because this is what you’ve been more involved in. And if you were talking about the parenting app itself, probably Tanzania would’ve been first to mind because that’s where the randomised control trial happened, that’s where the results have been coming out.

But I want to dig into your work on this. And that really is related to these facilitator apps. And what’s interesting there is that the original facilitator apps were to support the facilitators of ParentText. So it actually wasn’t the app programme that the facilitator app was being used to support, it was the chatbot programme.

And I found that very interesting that that’s where the need emerged to support facilitators in particular ways. The original facilitator app was conceived as a support to facilitators of ParentText. Whereas now, if I’m not mistaken, you are having facilitator apps, which are supporting facilitators of ParentApp itself.

[00:03:14] Michele: That’s exactly right. And the apps that we are developing for facilitators contain all of the content that facilitators must be or should be interested in, all of the suggestions, but also some supporting tools like ways to submit reports about sessions that have been made. We recently added a feedback form. We have the option to log in with Google or Apple in order to maintain the data, even though the facilitators may change devices and so on. So the apps are really growing, and every new one that we do is not just a copy paste of the previous one.

[00:03:59] David: There are always variants, this is our nature. But I think what I really like in what you’re saying, and this was conceived from the beginning, is that the facilitator app emerged because facilitators were struggling with both the reporting side, but also the actual structured processes which they had in manuals. But by having them within an app, it actually enables them to interact more naturally and easily with the other digital programmes.

So this is a really exciting innovation which emerged as a need. I have to confess that in 2019, when we first started discussions with PLH, even before the 2020 workshop, my nudging was always: couldn’t we start by doing facilitator apps? Because that seems to be what would be most useful, even for the face-to-face parenting programmes. And that was overruled initially because the priority for the digitisation was getting to scalable solutions, which ParentApp and ParentText have both demonstrated that they can have elements of, through the randomised control trials and the evidence that’s building up around that.

But, I think in terms of where we can add the most value quickly, it is on the facilitator apps. This was always clear that the facilitators being supported to do their work, whether they’re facilitating a face-to-face implementation, a chatbot implementation or an app based implementation, if we can get the right tools to support them, that’s where I see there being a “low hanging fruit” – this is the expression I like – you know, the quick wins, easy things to do where pain points, which are felt by facilitators, by implementers can be reduced.

And so I’m really excited by the work that you are doing on the facilitator apps and how that’s coming together.

[00:06:09] Michele: Maybe one thing to add to what I was saying before: I realised I said that the apps contain all of the relevant content for a facilitator, but it’s actually a bit more than that, well, quite a bit more than that. For example, we may have different content depending on the context that can be selected by the facilitator, but also in the way that the sessions will be delivered, depending on that, the content may change slightly.

And then you’re right, there’s the reporting that is very important. But a second point I wanted to add is that there’s also another layer where we do add value with the app, which is that we collect data of how the app is utilised, and that allows PLH to analyse what the impact is, how the app is being used and how to improve upon it. And this data collection part is particularly important.

[00:07:13] David: Absolutely. And what I like is the fact that you’ve separated out the data collection on the app for the app usage, which is enabling us, in the facilitator app context, of course, to reinforce and improve the way facilitators use the app. But there’s also the data related to the sessions that they run, and that’s actually coming from the participants that they are facilitating.

And that’s the reporting and the M&E piece, which is solving. I remember the discussions with Thailand about this. This is a hard problem to solve in general, that in Thailand, there was a lot of effort that was going in with UNICEF and other partners to try and help enable this reporting to be integrated. And every case we’ve come across, it’s actually one of the big barriers for facilitators.

I think it was the Philippines where in some of the discussions, no, maybe it was Malaysia, I think it was Malaysia, where some of the discussions about the facilitators actually doing the reporting, this was the biggest barrier. One of the big barriers to scaling out even the face-to-face programmes was the fact that actually the reporting requirements for facilitators weren’t constructive. They were needed, they were necessary, but they weren’t constructive. They weren’t helping the facilitators to do a better job.

I’m not saying that we’ve nailed it with the app, but I am saying that with the app, I think we can get closer to getting something where the facilitators find what they do useful, and it is also useful for the monitoring evaluation purposes. I always love multipurpose sort of actions, you know, and the fact that it’s useful for the facilitators themselves to help their reflection, to get them to reflect, and to put down what actually happens so they can communicate that as well. But then of course, once they’re communicating it, to be able to then actually have researchers engage in this to see how to improve.

[00:09:28] Michele: And the collaboration with PLH is ongoing, it’s very strong, so I wonder if I may ask a question, do you have a vision of how the apps will keep on developing in the coming years?

[00:09:46] David: Within PLH, within the parenting programmes, we are getting to the stage where there is a push towards country level implementations. So that will lead to a number of different innovations. I have my own, I’ll share some of my concrete things. There was a big piece of work that was done very early on, where the wishlist of things we would like is huge, so I can put a few of those out there.

At the moment, the parenting programmes are seen as a programme which you complete and you then get a certificate of completion. But apps are at their best when they’re used continually. And one of the things that has been found with the trials is that adding additional content to continue engagement beyond the actual intervention period is something which is very well received by the parents who complete it.

And so actually this transition of the app being something which is delivering a programme which can be completed to being an ongoing resource for parents, that’s something which we’ve been discussing for a long time. It is not in the immediate horizon, but it is certainly something which is on the roadmap of things that we would like to have.

And then that also ties in with the idea that, well, once you have an app which is out there getting used at scale, I’ve been having discussions with our partners at Oxford about how you could actually embed the research into that. So, instead of having research studies for which you build the technology, we could now be embedding the research studies into the implementation of the actual technologies. And that is different research methods, but you can get very rigorous research like that, and innovation is needed there. So that’s something else I’m really excited about.

I’m also very excited about the fact that – you mentioned these variants – actually having for different facilitators who are in slightly different contexts, they can now choose between different variants of the content for their context. And I hope that’s going to explode as well where these variants might also be owned and managed by certain specific partners.

And there’s been a lot of talk about faith-based organisations as real partners in parenting programmes. Many faith-based organisations supporting young parents or parents of young children, is something which is definitely seen to be within the remit. And even for the teens programme, this is something where there’s a need for this.

And so I could absolutely see how, as we start to get the scaling processes sorted, I’d love to see these really different variants emerging within countries, which will actually help local ownership emerge for implementation partners who have their own agendas and who are wanting to do their own things.

And that gets me onto the next really exciting piece, which is, in my dream, we would actually start to flip over the development processes. So, if you take local implementing partners, they might be implementing a PLH programme because they have funding from a particular donor or a particular grant to do that, but they might also be implementing other programmes, maybe a youth mental health programme or a whole range of other things. It would be really transformative if all those programmes that a given local organisation was doing were working within similar technologies. And so the facilitator app, there’s no reason why it’s just a facilitator app for the parenting programme. If they also have mental health programmes, then supporting the facilitators of those youth mental health programmes, it would be a very sensible thing that the facilitator app could support those facilitators as well.

There’s a lot of crossover which is possible, and that’s what I’d love to see eventually, that we’re starting to switch from it being intervention led technology to implementer led technology, where the implementers are really taking more ownership of the technology itself.

[00:14:38] Michele: It seems like this idea fits well with how the backend of the open up builder is set up, people might not know, listeners might not know that for PLH, for example, for facilitator apps, we have a global version of the app that contains the very basic ideas that will be in common between every single facilitator app, and then we can have variants, which means that we just add or substitute upon the global with whatever is needed for the specific deployment.

And the hope is that this will make our life easier the more we go on, because we can then cherry pick bits and parts from every deployment in order to create new ones. And also, again, listeners might not know, the main idea of the open app builder is to make building somewhat easier than it is at the moment by having an interface that is just more readable and usable. I’m not going into details, but this should make it more feasible for a non-technical person to interact with the app. 

[00:15:56] David: I think this is worth a separate episode, so let’s actually do that, let’s schedule in another time and have another episode where we dig into a bit of the technology of the open app builder and why this is serving potentially these future goals for the parenting programmes.

[00:16:14] Michele: Absolutely. And thanks for the discussion, it’s been interesting.

[00:16:18] David: Thank you, and it’s been really good. And I’m really grateful that you’ve stepped into a role where you are happy to discuss this. One of the lackings of the podcast is that most of the other people working in this space, as part of our team on open app builder or open chat builder, are not keen on becoming podcasters, you know, on being part of this effort. So I haven’t had enough discussions on this, so I’m really delighted we’re able to dig into, and start having some of these discussions.

[00:16:51] Michele: Thanks, David. I’m way out of my comfort zone.

[00:16:54] David: That’s good. That’s how it should be.

[00:16:56] Michele: Yeah. Yeah. See you next time.

[00:16:59] David: Thanks.