MERL Tech DC 2019

It’s an article of faith among social impact leaders that you need good data if you want to build models or design programs that solve hard problems. For many of the most challenging problems, however, there simply is no data available, or at least not enough of the kind of data needed to plan or measure progress. In this interactive session and discussion, we present alternatives to standard data collection and statistical techniques, demonstrating a number of quantitative and qualitative strategies—not widely known—that make it possible to extract actionable insights despite the absence of high-quality data.