The Issues Management Engine – IME – links together all the data collected by SIGWatch about NGOs, issues and activist campaigns from around the world since 1997, and gives you a set of tools to analyse the data in extremely sophisticated ways.
IME will help you for example to spot and track emerging issues, see which groups are driving which issues, and find out how campaigning has evolved over the last months or years.
IME is not only an powerful set of analytics for understanding the role of NGOs in issues management, it is built on a unique dataset of some 30,000 activist news reports and over 1,000 profiles of influential NGOs. New reports and profiles are being added and updated every day, making SIGWatch IME probably the most powerful living database to guide issues management professionals available today.
Issues and tags
All the data in IME is linked by "issues" and "tags". An issue is the smallest unit of controversy capable of sparking an activist campaign. Examples of issues: phthalates in plastics, fracking in gas drilling, pesticide residues on food.
Tags associate issues with each other in logical yet highly flexible ways. They group issues into industries (eg. energy, oil), into technologies (eg. biotech, nanotech), or into common concerns (eg. human rights, safety, pollution). Thus the tag ‘Plastics’ links BPA, plastic bags, PVC, etc, ‘Chemicals’ links pesticides, plastics, BPA, etc, ‘Climate change’ links all energy-using activities... Using the IME tools, you can use tags to filter lists of issues and to aggregate data across multiple issues.
Using a specially written set of algorithms, we have assigned every NGO activity news report an Impact number based on the number of NGOs involved and how each NGO is connected to regional or global networks. The Impact numbers quantify significant NGO activity level by issue or groups of issues (linked through their tags), the basis of our pioneering Issues Index, Issues Tracker and Issues Map tools.
What do the different IME tools do?
NGOs
A fully searchable database of all the NGOs tracked by SIGWatch. Filter your searches by geography (region and country), tag and Issue, and NGO type (eg. Global, national, coalition) or search by NGO name. You get a listing of NGOs with basic data that fit your criteria. Click on an NGO name to find out more and to see what’s in the SIGWatch news archive about that NGO.
Countries
Fast listings of NGOs by country or regions, with some basic information to help you locate groups of interest. Use the filters to narrow the results. As before, clicking on an NGO name gets you more information.
Archive
Archive puts you in the heart of our 30,000 record database of NGO activity news reports since 1997. Use this tool to find out what’s been happening, week by week, by NGO or issue or country or region.
Advanced Search
Allows you to refine your database searches to a high degree. You can include your own free text search terms and filter results by start and end date.
Issues Index
Generates a colour-coded snapshot of NGO activity per issue and tag for the last three months. The Issues Index also identifies issues that are completely new or that have re-emerged after being dormant for more than 9 months. Activity levels represent the sum of all the Impact numbers linked with that issue or group of issues (because they share the same tag) for the previous 9 months. Trend indicators are calculated by comparing the most recent 3 months' activity with the last 9 months to see if average levels of activity have risen or fallen and by how much.
Issues Tracker
Plots Issues Index data on a timeline going back from 6 months up to 10 years. You can compare three different issues/tags on the same graph. Each data point represents one month's NGO activity (the sum of the Impact numbers associated with the issue or tag for the desired geographical area).
Issues Map
Displays region and world maps with the countries colour-coded to show relative levels of NGO activity by issue or tag.
