Giving Compass' Take:

• Grigory Okhotin and Leonid Drabkin explain how OVD-Info uses feedback to improve their efforts to track politically-motivated prosecutions in Russia. 

• How can funders support the effective implementation of feedback strategies for existing programs? 

• Learn more about the Power of Feedback


OVD-Info is a human rights project that monitors politically-motivated prosecutions in Russia. They run a telephone hotline and legal chatbot, provide lawyers in court and pay for the work of analysts and journalists to protect human rights.

In order to ensure that they are accountable to their primary constituents, OVD-Info has partnered with CIVICUS Resilient Roots to design a data-driven primary constituent accountability project. They are focused on 5 main groups of constituents: activists, journalists, donors, readers, and the OVD-Info staff. They collect feedback from these constituents through a wide variety of tools, including F2F interviews, online surveys, bots, and analytics from their website traffic, social media, etc. Almost all of the quantitative information and data (including the number of calls on our hotline, number of likes on Facebook, average donations, etc) feeds into a dashboard that tracks, interprets and analyzes their performance on key indicators. .

Building an accountability mechanism is no small feat. Though OVD-Info has made great strides towards measuring and responding to all of their constituents’ needs, they have also run into some issues. OVD-Info came to the LabStorm group for advice working through various roadblocks, such as communication with constituents and team buy-in.

  1. For the full picture, integrate qualitative and quantitative data.
  2. Prioritize staff engagement with the dashboard.
  3. Report back to constituents frequently.

Read the full article about a data-driven constituent accountability mechanism by Grigory Okhotin and Leonid Drabkin at FeedbackLabs.