AgTech Survey FAQs

60 Decibels is a tech-powered impact measurement company that makes it easy to listen to the people who matter most. We speak directly to customers, employees or beneficiaries, usually over mobile phones. We return high-quality data to you in weeks, with minimal hassle or distraction, to help you maximize your impact and grow your business.

Our main responsibilities are to:

• Understand your business context and impact thesis
• Translate your impact thesis into an agreed-upon set of metrics
• Design a mixed-method survey tool to gather these metrics, using our tried-and-tested questions developed over more than 1,000 projects. A typical survey consists of 40-45 quantitative and qualitative questions.
• Receive customer contact details from you (typically mobile phone numbers). We typically gather 250-300 responses, to ensure a representative sample. 
• Deploy the survey using our team of 850+ trained, in-country Research Assistants in 70+ countries, randomly calling from the list of numbers you’ve provided
• Clean and code all of the collected data
• Analyse the collected data and create a report that we deliver to you

Our goal, with this approach, is to make it as straightforward as possible to get the impact performance and customer feedback data that will help you serve your customers better, create great impact for them, and drive improved results for your business.

Since 2014, we’ve been building our approach to impact measurement working with resource-constrained social businesses. Our first clients were mostly in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, though now our work spans the Americas and Europe as well. We understand that you have a growing business to run and we recognize the significant constraints on your time and resources. At the same time, we know that you’re deeply committed to making real and lasting change for the customers you serve.

Our approach is designed to get you the information you need to serve these customers better in ways that improve their lives. We do this by bringing deep domain expertise in social impact measurement; a multi-sector library of tested questions to understand social impact; offering an approach that is fast, nimble, and burden-free and that’s proven to work remotely (over mobile phones); and the world’s largest database of benchmarked, customer-level social impact gathered from more than 200,000 stakeholder voices.

To evaluate and establish a standardized approach for assessing the value that farmers derive from digital farmer services (DFS) and establish the extent to which DFS use contributes to farmers’ climate resilience.

• Respondent Name
• Phone number

The survey will primarily be phone-based with a few select in-person qualitative interviews (across a few participating firms) by our partner, Busara Center for Behavioral Economics. We will let you know in case we need to do qualitative interviews with your farmers.

We will be using random sampling for this survey with respondents selected from the contact list you choose to submit. We will also be doing gender and tenure segmentation as part of the survey analysis.

No preparation will be required. We may however send out text messages to inform the participants of the survey and target contact date and time.

The phone survey participants will not be compensated for participating in the survey.

The survey is standardized because it is designed to enable aggregate analysis of 24 companies. There is some customization inherent as digital information solutions will receive the information version of the survey, instead of credit, insurance, etc. If there is a question that is truly irrelevant to your user base, it can be removed. To give you a better idea of what to expect, the following metrics will be assessed among others:

• The extent to which the agtech meets farming needs.
• The extent to which the agtech makes it easier or harder to perform the solution’s target farm activity e.g. accessing credit, providing advisory services etc.
• Comfort or discomfort levels associated with use of the digital agricultural solution.
• Stickiness of the digital agricultural solution as measured by loss aversion.
• Willingness to pay.
• Perceived vs realized resilience to climate related shocks as a result of the digital agricultural solution.
• The extent to which the digital agricultural solution reaches lower income populations.

We could share the survey instrument once finalized in January 2024 but we encourage you to submit your completed onboarding form as soon as possible, given that participation slots are limited. Please note that the deadline for submission is set for the 21st December 2023.

About 15-20 minutes.

The anonymized Raw Data (data collected as part of the survey) associated with your firm and partner farmers to be surveyed, may be published and distributed publicly pursuant to the Global Access policy between 60 Decibels and the Grantor (see http://globalaccess.gatesfoundation.org/). Only firms that accept these terms may participate in the survey. The data from your firm will not be identifiable to your firm in the published dataset or report, but your firm will be listed as a participant. 

Participating firms will receive a private snapshot report summarizing the results from their farmers, and their respective anonymized raw data sets. An aggregate report with findings across all the 24 participating firms will be shared publicly.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and Busara are funding this work and deliverables will be shared with the organisation. The focus of the survey is to contribute towards the measurement of value farmers derive from digital agricultural solutions and not for BMGF/Busara to evaluate the individual impact of the participating firms. If you have specific concerns about this, please let us know.

Participating companies’ involvement in the survey will be limited once the contacts are submitted. We may however reach out with some queries after contact cleaning and to understand your definition of active use so we are able to tease it out in the survey. We may also request for your involvement in some dissemination events but will give you ample notice in advance.

Once data collection is completed, our reporting will include:

• Insights Reports for Each Company: These reports will provide outcomes of each company’s impact on farmers and the farmers’ experience with the company. 
• Raw data sets: Anonymised raw data sets will be provided to each participating firm for further in-house analysis.
• Aggregate report: This report will have overall survey findings from all the 24 participating firms.
• Meaningful Use and Resilience Testing Implementation Guide: We will provide a guide on our recommended approach to use the meaningful use survey instrument, how to calculate the score based on our testing, and key lessons learned. The guide will also offer suggestions on measuring the resilience impacts of DFS. 

Participating firms are required to obtain all necessary consents and approvals from the designated farmers to: (a) provide their contact information to 60 Decibels, and (b) for 60 Decibels to contact the designated individuals and to collect the relevant data and information. By sharing your farmer contact information, you authorize 60 Decibels to contact the designated individuals and collect the relevant data and information. 60 Decibels will therefore collect consumer data directly from mutually agreed to individuals (“Designated Individuals”). That said, we will ensure that we collect farmers’ explicit consent to respond to our questions before we conduct the survey.

We will select respondents in a manner that ensures an adequate spread across the target geographies and service clusters. This implies that we may need to prioritize certain contacts per company based on their locations or services accessed as opposed to surveying across a company’s entire contact list.