Spark Conference

As Sabre is to the airline industry, Spark is to humanitarian industry.

Imagine a day when each airline had their own reservation system. We all relied on travel agents to navigate different computer systems just to book a flight. In the early 70′s, American Airlines teamed up with IBM and created the Sabre system. It was one of the first computerized reservation and ticket transaction systems. Originally used only by AA, the system was expanded to travel agents in 1976. It is currently used by a large number of companies, including Eurostar and SNCF. Today the system connects more than 30,000 travel agents and 3 million consumers with more than 400 airlines, 50 car-rental companies, 35,000 hotels and dozens of railways, tour companies, ferries and cruise lines. This evolved into ACP (Airlines Control Program), and later to TPF (Transaction Processing Facility). American spun off Sabre on March 15, 2000. Sabre was publicly traded corporation, Sabre Holdings, stock symbol TSG on the NYSE until taken private in March 2007.

Today, all non-government organizations (NGO) use different systems for Design, Monitoring, and Evaluation (DM&E). Each year, billions of dollars are donated by individuals, businesses, and governments through NGO’s to reach the end beneficiaries. Unfortunately, there is no standards for reporting impact, so it is impossible for donors to get a consolidated report of their donation impact across multiple agencies. In effect, the non-profit industry is where the airline industry was in 1972.

On March 11, 2008, World Vision one of the leading NGO’s ($2B/year) gathered together 15 organizations to discuss the possibility of developing an inter-agency DM&E system that would benefit the entire non-profit industry. If successful, the system (code named “Spark”) would enable all non-profits the ability to capture impact data into a common platform and report back to donors. It is believed that providing higher quality and more transparent impact reports to donors will increase accountability and ultimately result in higher donations to the organizations that provide this information to it’s donors.

During the Spark conference, each organization presented its current DM&E strategy and timetable. There was amazing similarity between the organizations and each organization has a high priority on upgrading their current DM&E to a Web 2.0 platform. One of the huge opportunities around Spark is to improve the efficiency of gathering impact data at the field level. Each of these organizations has hundreds of projects located in different countries around the world. This makes it extremely difficult in capturing data consistently and using the same quantitative and qualitative monitoring standards.

However, this is changing.

For example, many NGO’s’ receive PEPFAR grants for their Aids relief programs. PEPFAR demands that grant recipient organizations use a specific impact measurement in their DM&E system. This forces NGO’s to gather and report data in a very specific way, so that NGO’s can be held accountable for the grant money used in their programs. PEPFAR is just one illustration that proves NGO’s can create DM&E system that conform to a standard. In the early 70′s, every airline had their own standards for reservations. Once a few of the largest airlines came together on a standard, the rest were obliged to follow suit. The same thing will happen in the Humanitarian industry.

World Vision has already begun developing a Program Management Information System (PMIS) for their own use, which they have offered to donate to the Spark project to get the industry-wide initiative going. This offer has caused a number of NGO’s to ask a tough question, “Do we continue with our own DM&E initiative or jump on the Spark bandwagon and possibly get a better system than we could develop on our own for less money?” I’m sure those same questions were being asked back in 1976 by various airline executives. Looking back, we can see the airlines made the right choice.

Right-click here to download a PDF of the Spark Conference Summary notes