#ms11: Project Participants' Satisfaction

Against the backdrop of increasing and more protracted conflicts and crises, one of the main objectives of WHH’s strategy for #OnePlanetZeroHunger is to provide assistance and support to the people affected by emergencies and in this way not only ensure their survival but also their dignity. However, interventions must be appropriate and useful. Measuring project participants’ satisfaction with WHH’s assistance and support is thus very important. WHH wants to deliver the best quality assistance in the right situation and ensure that the people who receive assistance are happy with it – ideally because the quality is good and not just because in a desperate situation, they will take any support no matter how slow and inappropriate it is. A sudden decrease in project participants’ satisfaction can reveal shortcomings or problems in the assistance provision or suggest that its usefulness might be limited. The Project Participants’ Satisfaction indicator is useful to assess the quality of any intervention where assistance in the form of services, training, or items is provided.

The #ms Project participants’ satisfaction indicator measures the number of project participants who are satisfied with the provided assistance, especially its usefulness.

Collect the following data by conducting individual interviews with a representative sample (WHH sampling guidelines) of the project participants/ individuals targeted in your project. The population size is composed of the number of project participants that are supposed to benefit directly from provided assistance – be it items, services, or training.

Because this indicator asks about assistance received in the past, it does not require a baseline and comparison value. It should therefore be collected as part of interim/ midline or endline surveys but is not suitable for baseline surveys.

• More information: #ms11 Participants' Satisfaction Handbook (EN)

Disaggregate  by gender, age groups, geographical area, persons with disability and other vulnerability criteria.

This is a 'Measuring Success' (#ms) indicator. It is obligatory for all WHH projects to integrate all #ms indicators that align with the project context, with a minimum requirement of utilizing at least one indicator (and implementing one #ms qualitative tool).

1)  The appropriate timing to measure this indicator depends on the activity: Between the assistance activity and the survey, there should be enough time for project participants to determine how happy they are with the assistance. On the other hand, the survey should not take place too late after the activity, as this increases the risk that project participants forget about any issues with regards to the provision of the assistance or by whom they received it.

For distribution of items, it is recommended to measure this indicator in a Post-Distribution Monitoring (PDM) survey around 14 days after the activity.

Sometimes you might want to measure this indicator earlier than 14 days after the assistance activity, especially if the target population is likely to move.

2)  Prior to data collection, enumerators should be trained in basic data-collection skills to get genuine answers from respondents. Respondents should not feel like WHH’s presence or assistance will be withdrawn if they say they are not satisfied. This helps WHH to pinpoint issues and improve its intervention. The training should also equip them with basic knowledge on typical assistance activities (i.e., the provision of items, services, or training).

3) It may be helpful to use a visual scale to explain the possible response options on the four-point scale.