The RA Primer to starting your own Coverified Sheet
So you want to start verifying the deluge of Covid resource links and verify which ones work and which ones are exhausted already? Here’s how you go about it
1. Build a Core RA team that’s motivated
There’s hundreds of ex-JPAL/EPoD/IDInsight/ISB RA’s who want to help. Find ones who’ve handled surveyor teams/know field managers and surveyors they can recruit and are generally motivated. Make a core whatsapp group. Coordinate from here. Bonus: If you have complementary time zones thats an advantage, your team never sleeps. Make a whatsapp group for just yourselves to talk through decision points
(P.S: Redundancy helps! At some point your team will get affected with Covid. Support them as much as you can and also have redundancy in your core team, so if one person’s out another takes their place)
2. Build a Surveyor team with a Great Field Manager
You’re not going to do any of the work. Your surveyors are. Find a manager who can talk to/manage/train surveyors on your behalf. You need a good manager. Alternately you will need to be a manager, which is doable but difficult. If you’re having trouble finding a good manager reach out to us, maybe we can help.
3. Pay Everyone for the first week then fundraise
We’ve only done this for about a week and a half. We started with paying every surveyor 10,000 for 10 days. That 10K is a cash transfer to a surveyor at the very least, who are out of jobs at the moment, and a commitment device. It will also buy you time to get something up and running for people to see when you do a fundraiser for round 2. Don’t be stingy.
Now, when you have to fundraise: Do it on Ketto. Make a video, write a description and it should be up and running in 1–2 working days. Tap into developement networks, people from your past organizations, and reach out to us, we’ll amplify. From our experience, fundraising won’t not be the biggest hiccup, people will reach out to help. But also, if it doesnt work out, thats okay, even 10 days work is worth it!
Here’s our example fundraiser:
P.S Its hard, but check your impact evaluation hats, you can’t know if you’re getting bank for the buck!
4. Get Links to Verify and make a google sheet:
Start anywhere and everywhere for links to verify: Instagram channels of cities, your own networks, Whatsapp groups, Facebook, Twitter, etc. The one big source for hospitals beds is lists/dashboards that the government has put out for all the centers appointed for COVID treatment. We have been using this to pick up hospital leads in Bihar/JHK. Many states have some basic or advanced (like JHK where you can in theory book a bed on the Amrit Vahini app) versions of this and this will be the universe of beds for COVID treatment that you can verify.
Why re-verify if the govt has a dashboard which they seem to be updating — because what is better than one source of data, two sources! From our experience, we have been able to get “real-time” availability, which in many cases is different than what’s shown on the dashboard, because of many reasons. No matter how trustworthy a link looks like, always verify.
This might get you into some run in with the medical officers/administration/government but its worth it, and your trained field staff who have immense experience of dealing with administration from all the government projects they have worked on is your best bet. Tread this with caution, but hey, anyone has a right to get information about current bed availability!
We have also trained the surveyors to scrape Twitter using a simple query for their districts and check those resource links. But well, sometimes our verified leads come back to us!
Once you have links, make a Whatsapp group with all the RAs and Surveyors and start dumping links in there.
We’ve divided who verifies what by district. We have a sign-up sheet where surveyors assign themselves to districts everyday based on need and load of links. As this is not a 9–5 job, survey team has split themselves into a morning and an evening shift, so that we have recently added leads at every hour. We also have 1–2 people to “back-check”/re-verify the links, although admittedly we haven’t been doing it as much as we’d want to — for fear of people not taking our calls anymore to bandwidth constraints. The surveyors use their discretion on calling multiple times a day- leave enough gap to not annoy and lose the person at the other end, but to have real-time information in cases when only 1 bed was available to begin with! Your amazing field manager from 2. will be instrumental in making this as seamless as possible. For beds and oxygen, we have a buffer sheet where all dead leads go, we check them out when we’re out of links to verify, hoping these exhausted leads come back for round 2.
P.S: If you have more ways to get links or better management structures, Let us know!
5. Publish Fast
This is not your dissertation, publish within a day or two and get it out on twitter. It’s best to have something imperfect than nothing at all. You start helping people immediately when you put the sheet out, and remember your verified leads have a shelf-life of 1 day, such are the times.
Where to Share: Whatsapp groups are the best, ask your survey team, your own networks, ask RA’s on twitter, ask us. We’ll get it out. Even better: If you can get numbers of ANM’s/AWWs/ASHAs and Panchayat Mukhiya’s, Whatsapp it to them. They might be out there, publicly available PDFs on some horrible looking government website. This might help reach people in places where twitter might not be reaching them. We’re trying this out we’ll let you know how well it works.
6. Don’t Rebuild The Wheel: Useful Links For Sheets
Format For Coverified Sheet (Bihar/Jharkhand):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1foeKIDRi_U6VTsyv1s_Hi3-5dWbQfIBrARgjeQDgwaU/edit#gid=0
Format For Surveyor Sign-up Sheet (Bihar/Jharkhand):
Format For Buffer Sheet with exhausted leads (Bihar/Jharkhand):
7. Index your sheet online and offline:
- Talk to @/nipunnyy on twitter so they can get you onto https://www.covidindiaresources.com/ . They’re also pretty swamped with work so you can also tag their twitter handle directly: @/COVResourcesIn
- Talk to @/hargup13 on twitter so he can index your sheet on covidsupport.neera.ai so then you can share this online.
- https://covidbedsindia.in/ is a good geographical tool to index hospital bed information but you’ll need to add in location info (google maps link) for every hospital you have in you sheet. (tweet to @/pxthxk on twitter)
- Whatsapp Bot 1 : https://bit.ly/3vQdbHf . Get in touch with Anmol to index your sheet here: Anmol.prabhu@machadalo.com or tweet to him at @/covidmdbot
- Findabed.in (though you’ll need to message them on their socials)
- If you can, go to the Panchayati Raj department in your state. Many have public Mukhiya/Village Head/Self Help Group numbers. Have a small team that calls them and disseminates information from your sheet verbally. Telemedicine is often the most useful here as we’re discovering. All mukhiya’s will ask for a doctors number if they know it’s available.
More places to Index too? Let us know!!!!
Hope this helps, feel free to reach out for any other assistance.
By Aditi, Kritarth and Simoni
bhowmick@devdatalab.org
kritarth5@gmail.com
simonij@uchicago.edu
