Introduction

One of the Digital Impact Alliance’s roles is to serve as the official steward of the Principles for Digital Development, a set of generally accepted design and operational principles for utilizing technology in development programs that have more than 240 endorsers across the digital development ecosystem. As steward of the Digital Principles, DIAL manages a community of practice, and develops and disseminates support, training, and advocacy materials to help organizations apply the Digital Principles to their ICT4D portfolios. Recently, DIAL and others have been considering how to provide endorsers with more design, monitoring, evaluation, and learning resources to encourage adoption of the Principles and improved programming within the digital ecosystem.

Development and Intended Use

DIAL’s most frequent feedback about the Principles from endorsing organizations pertains to how the Principles can be applied at an organization. While providing overly decontextualized rules and checklists may defeat the purpose of using effectiveness principles to navigate the complexities of digital development, following the Be Data Driven principle, these indicators are in part a response to that feedback. Generally, these indicators can be used to provide endorsers a more concrete sense of what applying the Principles looks like at their organization and partner organizations and how to begin measuring those applications. More specifically, there are multiple intended uses for multiple intended users within the digital ecosystem, including, but not limited to, supporting the quality of procurement, program design, monitoring, management, evaluation, accountability, and learning within principles-driven programming.