June Collaboration Meeting Report

The meeting brought together 25 participants representing the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the FEWS NET Early Warning (EW) team, the Learning and Data Hub (Hub) team, and the Science team. The welcome was followed by an overview of the agenda. The teams provided brief updates on collaboration activities. The Early Warning-Science team collaborations included routine agroclimatology support and updating shapefiles. The teams also piloted the use of the Water Requirement Satisfaction Index for East Africa in the EW team's Global Dashboard for Hotspot Identification. The improvements identified through this process will be implemented in the future. The Early Warning-Hub team collaborations focused on Data Sprints. The teams reported on three activities related to Data Sprints, including data ingestion into and extraction from the FEWS NET Data Warehouse (FDW). The teams also discussed data and system documentation, with the Hub identifying new features that require documentation. The Country Case Study (CCS) was also discussed, with previous suggested improvements being integrated into the Sprint process. The Science-Hub team collaborations noted that other USAID teams, including SERVIR and other projects, have expressed interest in collaborating with the Hub to implement the KoBo Toolbox and Open Data Kit. The teams also discussed the Pillar 3 request for task order proposals, which was published by the USAID Office of Acquisition and Assistance on June 16. The request is to update existing livelihood zones in 10 countries using the Household Economy Analysis framework. The meeting also discussed joint annual work planning (JAWP), with USAID presenting a timeline for IY3. The Hub proposed developing a collaborative template as an improvement to the IY2 collaboration matrix. The EW team proposed holding short, half-day regional workshops with headquarters and project offices across the FEWS NET team to facilitate JAWP dialogues. The meeting also addressed the topic of brand identity. USAID determined that refreshing the FEWS NET brand was necessary due to the growing number of implementing partners and the need to standardize the brand across various platforms and interfaces. USAID conducted research to understand perceptions of FEWS NET through the Website Discovery process and stakeholder interviews. The research suggested that there is a lack of understanding about what FEWS NET is and the work that it does. Phase2 proposed an update from "FEWS NET" to "FEWS Network" and offered an Elevator Speech to explain who and what FEWS Network is in 20 seconds or less. The proposed brand identity includes a new primary color palette, including "FEWS Network Green" and "USAID Black." The secondary palette includes medium and dark blue grays. The color landscape analysis showed that the new proposed palette is consistent with the colors used by other organizations closest to FEWS NET. The proposed brand identity also includes recommendations for improving access and application of FEWS NET's analysis and reporting, including using active voice, adapting design of hyperlinks, breaking text into scannable chunks, and improving the readability of text.