By Fiorella Riccobono, Communications Manager

Starbucks continues to dominate coffee culture as local cafes struggle to survive a pandemic economy. Local coffee store owners will have to think outside the box to compete with the convenience that giant coffee chains offer.

A whopping 63% of American adults drink coffee daily, according to the National Coffee Association USA (NCA). We wanted to know which factors contributed most to where they decide to purchase their cup of coffee.

Premise asked 250 Contributors across the country to order a medium drink from either Starbucks or their local coffee shop and report back on their experiences.

Here is what we learned:

• 66% of Contributors decided to go to Starbucks over a local coffee shop when given a choice.Overwhelmingly, the Contributors who went to Starbucks did so out of convenience.
• However, 97% of Starbucks customers who order on the app would go elsewhere if they were notified on the Starbucks App that they were out of the ingredients needed to make their drink of choice
• Starbucks drinks were enjoyed marginally more than drinks ordered at a local coffee shop
• People are 35% more likely to order a Chai or Matcha at Starbucks than a local coffee shop

But while Contributors by and large favored Starbucks, there were several factors that tipped the scales in favor of local coffee shops.

• Contributors who went to a local coffee shop overwhelmingly said they did so because it’s more affordable.
• Customers are 1.2x more likely to stay an hour sitting at a local coffee shop than a Starbucks coffee
• Customers at local coffee shops care more about ambiance than those who go to Starbucks
• Customers who drink coffee in local coffee shops care about ethical coffee 2x more than those who go to Starbucks

According to Bloomberg, “The U.S. will have 25,307 outlets specializing in coffee or tea by the end of 2020, down 7.3% from a year earlier in the first decline since 2011, according to estimates by research firm Euromonitor International. Annual sales will plunge 12% to $24.7 billion.”

There is a narrative that Starbucks’ biggest competition is the growing trendy local coffee shops. However, Starbucks has maintained its competitive edge.

Although local coffee shops appeal to those coffee drinkers seeking more affordable cups of coffee that are ethically sourced, more coffee drinkers are actually seeking out the convenience of Starbucks.

While the rise of trendy neighborhood shops had the potential to draw customers away from Starbucks in the long term, Starbucks has managed to rebrand in a way that has maintained their appeal and made their brand easily accessible.

The Seattle-based coffee giant has a successful “pickup” concept and a drive-thru at some locations to cut waiting times. This supports our findings that the Contributors who went to Starbucks did so out of convenience.

While many coffee enthusiasts may still prefer the ambiance at their local coffee shop and want to support local businesses, coffee shop owners may need to rethink how they differentiate themselves now that Starbucks has shown to not only be a major competitor to other national coffee chains, but to local coffee shops as well.

Want to learn more about where you stand compared to your competitors? Get in touch with us today.

But Americans are more likely to be concerned about COVID and its variants than their U.K. counterparts.

By Maury Blackman, CEO, Premise Data

A recent survey by data collection company Premise in the U.S. and the U.K. found that Americans were nearly twice as likely to not have received a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine (45%) than their U.K. counterparts (23%).

Attitudes toward getting vaccinated in the future varied significantly by country.

The data was collected using a novel approach of smartphone users paid like “gig” workers and resulted in substantial responses in the thousands to date with more coming.

Premise’s data shows that most Americans and Brits have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. However, based on Premise’s current findings, public health officials are likely going to face more challenges convincing the unvaccinated in the U.S. to change their minds compared to those unvaccinated in the U.K.

Here is additional data found by Premise to date from its smartphone workers (called “contributors”). The data shows the level of resistance to vaccination and possible openings to persuade the unvaccinated to become vaccinated.

The survey found that one-third of unvaccinated adults in the U.S. are against ever getting vaccinated.

In contrast, only 23% of U.K.’s unvaccinated population said they will never get the vaccine, and over two-thirds — 69% — of all unvaccinated adults in the U.K. say they’re open to the idea, provided there’s more evidence of its efficacy and testing/safety.

“The U.S. government has a serious journey ahead in convincing its citizens on the importance of getting vaccinated,” said Maury Blackman, CEO of Premise. “Through crowdsourced data, we learned about the stark differences in vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. versus the U.K. It is our civic duty not only to make vaccines widely accessible but also to educate Americans on the importance of the vaccine to build more trust.”

Specific reasons for refusing to ever get vaccinated also varied sharply by country. For respondents in the U.S., the far most common reason was a distrust of the government.

While in the U.K., unvaccinated respondents were split evenly between not trusting the government, not thinking COVID is a real danger, and other reasons.

But while Americans were more likely to be unvaccinated and against getting the COVID-19 vaccine, they’re also less likely to think COVID is not a real danger and are more concerned about COVID-19 variants than adults we surveyed in the U.K.

For instance, 36% of Americans who responded to our survey reported being “Very concerned” about COVID variants, compared to just 18% in the U.K.

This all suggests that public health officials in the U.K. have a more straightforward scientific job of convincing their unvaccinated of the dangers posed by COVID, the safety of the vaccine, and the effectiveness of the vaccine. Public health officials in the U.S., on the other hand, should be taking deeper dives into local communities to better understand vaccine hesitancy, build trust in areas with higher rates, and provide clear and compelling evidence of the overall importance of the COVID-19 vaccines.

Premise can help public health organizations and humanitarian organizations collect data around vaccine hesitancy and show how attitudes and behaviors change over time as the pandemic continues to evolve. This, in turn, can help make community outreach efforts more effective.

Premise’s survey was conducted from August 5, 2021 to August 17, 2021 and polled approximately 5,000 participants in the United States and 1,000 participants in the United Kingdom. The participants in the survey were part of Premise’s international network of paid “contributors” or “gig workers.” Premise’s survey was conducted through its participants’ smartphones at a speed and scale not traditionally seen in polling.

Want to learn more about how our platform can help you gain more insights into more communities quicker? Get in touch with us today.

By Matt Lindner, Senior Content Marketing Manager

Data drives innovation and improvements at the micro and macro levels of every organization.

Modern data collection requires three key elements:

• Speed. The pace of change in the business world has accelerated over the past two years, and it’s not going to slow down anytime soon. Businesses need quantitative and qualitative data in specific locations that they are in or aspire to be in and they need it quickly in order to make necessary changes and capitalize on opportunities.
• Agility. Modern data collection requires businesses and vendors alike to be nimble when it comes to iterating surveys and tasks. This empowers them to make adjustments to surveys and tasks in order to ensure they are collecting the right data in the right locations from the right target audiences.
• Connecting with the right audiences. Getting the right data means connecting with the right people regardless of where they live. That means reaching people in some of the most rural and remote areas of the world through their smartphones.

Premise saw those challenges and developed a more intelligent data aggregation solution that incorporates the best of both human and machine learning. The end result is an agile data aggregation platform that empowers organizations of all shapes and sizes to find Data for Every Decision™that they might have to make.

What is Premise Data?

Premise Data is a marketplace that connects organizations that are looking for insights with Contributors who can provide them.

Here’s how it works:

• Clients come to us with an issue they are trying to solve.
• We work with them to create tasks and/or surveys in specific locations.
• Our global network of Contributors can choose to complete these tasks and/or surveys in exchange for payment in the currency of their choice.

Insights from our Contributors help organizations make adjustments in real time by providing quantitative, qualitative, and photographic insights into what’s happening in specific markets.

Our Contributor network includes millions of people who live in more than 120 countries around the world in urban, suburban, and rural regions. This allows our clients to get real-time, on-the-ground insights into what’s happening in specific markets regardless of where they need to be.

How is Premise Different from Traditional Market Insight Providers?

Speed to Market

Premise empowers our clients to put tasks and surveys out into our marketplace in as little as a day.

Cutting down the amount of lead time required helps our clients obtain more data quicker so that they can make the necessary adjustments that lead to improvements in sales, profitability, and efficiency among other key metrics. This allows for more agile decision making, which in turn helps businesses and other organizations that we work with improve net promoter scores.

An Engaged Contributor Network

Premise Contributors tend to have a high degree of engagement with our app. Why? Because our team works with our clients to create tasks and surveys that they enjoy doing and feel valued for completing. Contributors are given clear instructions on how to successfully complete each survey or task in our marketplace. This ensures that the data our clients get is high quality and comprehensive.

In-the-Moment Observations

Premise offers our clients the opportunity to see what’s happening in key markets in real-time as data comes in. Because our app is smartphone based, our clients can see pictures of conditions at specific locations, gauge sentiment, and better understand what our Contributors are experiencing.

Flexibility

Premise operates on a credit based model rather than a one-size-fits-all model. This allows our clients to change course if a task or survey isn’t generating the results they wanted, run surveys or tasks in multiple locations, or even pause tasks to recalibrate in order to get the quality and quantity of data they need.

Start Small, Expand As You Go

Once our current customers start using the Premise platform, they tend to expand their spending — quickly. On average, our customers tend to start with smaller tasks initially and grow their overall footprint with us by running more tasks in more markets once they understand how easy it is to get a task into our marketplace and how fast they are able to collect insights.

Reach

Premise Contributors are everywhere. Our network includes millions of engaged individuals in more than 120 countries in areas that are both densely and sparsely populated. Our app is available in dozens of languages as well, ensuring nothing gets lost in translation. Wherever you do business, Premise can help you get insights quickly.

Here’s How Premise Can Be Utilized to Drive Long Term Results:

Recurring Retail Audits: Premise Contributors can perform regular retail audits for CPG brands and retailers of all sizes.

For instance, Premise recently worked with a multi-billion dollar global brand to conduct a product audit in a key market. Premise Contributors visited stores throughout the country to determine if the brand’s products were fresh, readily available, and favorably located on store shelves, among other things.

What our Contributors found was that certain regions had more expired and missing products than others. This gave the brand the insight it was previously lacking to reallocate resources to ensure that shoppers in those regions had more fresh products available to them.

Contributors could collect photos and share them so that the CPG brand is able to act in real time on this insight. This would help the CPG brand drive more sales by empowering them to adjust signage, pricing, or their supply chain to reduce out of stocks.

Secret Shopping: Nobody can give you a clearer picture of what it’s like to experience your brand than your customer. That’s why everyone from airports to hotel chains to retailers should be trusting Premise to provide them with insight into what’s happening in each individual location.

One example of this is a task Premise recently ran to identify which fast food chain had the best French fries. Given that this task was being run during a national ketchup shortage, we wanted to know which chains were giving away the most ketchup packets with orders of french fries and which were giving away the least. Premise Contributors were able to tell us that exact information in short order. In today’s business world, no detail is too small.

Employing Premise’s Contributor network as your secret shoppers can help you ensure that each of your locations is getting even the smallest of details like handing out the proper amount of ketchup packets per order right.

Competitive Insights: Whether you’re a major coffee chain or a local restaurant, Premise Contributors can tell you how you stack up against your competitors and why. We do this by creating survey tasks that gauge sentiment around particular brands, why people feel that way, and why they’d visit you over your competitors. We can also create tasks where they choose to visit one of your locations and one of your competitors to tell you what they see, what they like, what they don’t, and photos that help provide greater insights.

For example, Premise recently asked our Contributors to go grab a cup of coffee from either Starbucks or their local coffee shop. We found that based on their experiences, 66% of our Contributors prefer Starbucks overall, but are more likely to linger in a local coffee shop in part because they care more about the ambiance.

Resource Allocation: Premise Contributors can give you real-time insights into what’s happening on the ground in even the most remote parts of the world.

Premise recently worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help with polio immunization microplanning efforts in parts of Nigeria. Our Contributors were able to visit and name 90% of all unknown settlements while also locating 35 health facilities in unknown settlements. Photos from Contributors of those settlements offered more context and aided in the planning and delivery of inoculation services.

Having eyes and ears on the ground everywhere in the world helps humanitarian organizations and commercial businesses alike better understand where resources are needed and how to get them there.

Location Scouting: Businesses from restaurants to retailers are constantly on the lookout for the next hot location to reach more people. Our Contributors can help you identify potential new locations for your business by giving you insight into which businesses are nearby, how busy the area is, and when it tends to be the busiest. This helps businesses gain a better understanding of consumer behavior and traffic patterns and helps them get smarter about their expansion plans.

Want to learn more on why Premise is right for your business? Schedule a demo with us today.

ESGs provide companies with the knowledge and tools to become purpose-driven business leaders in their discipline.

We explore how companies can use crowd empowerment to drive change and examine why purpose-driven businesses are particularly well-positioned to tackle the world’s biggest problems. Taking advantage of the opportunities created by the need to tackle social and environmental issues is likely to be “disruptive” in many industries.

ESG metrics were used mostly by “impact investors” — investors who are themselves purpose driven and who are attempting to use their investments to drive positive change in the world until around 2013. That has changed as businesses and organizations become more conscious of their overall impact.

To many investors, caring about ESG metrics is a matter of preservation. The goal of cost reduction and securing an energy source are at the core of this environment. Meaning, if investors want to continue to be profitable, they need to secure the resources that make them profitable still exist in the future. In simple terms, don’t dry out the well of your resources.

Let’s take a look at European consumer goods giant and ESG initiative pioneer Unilever. Unilever sells more tea than anyone else, controlling nearly 30% of the branded tea business. Unilever also purchases roughly 12% of the world’s tea overall. Its Lipton brand alone sells roughly $3.5 billion worth of tea every year and has a global market share of nearly 3x that of its nearest rival, Tata Beverages, the owners of Tetley Tea.

Lipton’s success did not come without human and societal costs. Tea workers often lack access to education, health benefits, protection for illness or pregnancy and are rarely given housing. Tea harvesting also carries an environmental cost, driving deforestation and soil degradation.

Unilever is acutely aware of this. That’s why in 2010, Lipton committed to only using sustainably sourced tea by 2015.

Unilever originally took this on because they wanted to do the right thing, and immediately realized they needed to drive revenue while affecting positive environmental and social change. Once they made the switch, they had to figure out how to make money on their investment.

It started with marketing. Unilever capitalized on the fact that consumers truly care about whether or not what they consume is socially and environmentally productive, which is what led them to build brand buzz around that.

This ultimately translated “Brand Love” to Profits. Since Lipton had a product that was different while still being high quality, it could consider charging a higher price to capture consumers who were willing to pay more for a higher-quality tea, thus increasing profits.

There have been hundreds of academic studies exploring the link between ESG and corporate financial performance. In January 2018, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock sent out a letter to the CEOs of the companies in which Blackrock is invested.

He said, in part: “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate. Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential. It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth. It will remain exposed to activist campaigns that articulate a clearer goal, even if that goal serves only the shortest and narrowest of objectives. And ultimately, that company will provide subpar returns to the investors who depend on it to finance their retirement, home purchases, or higher education.”

Understanding how your business’s ESG initiatives are perceived in real time while auditing what you’re currently doing at a hyperlocal level are key first steps towards making the necessary changes that drive increases in sales and profits.

That’s where global crowdsourced data insights platforms like Premise come in. Premise operates a global crowdsourced data collection network that empowers organizations to get a comprehensive assessment of current initiatives at a macro and micro level. By creating tasks and surveys and putting them out into our marketplace, we have the ability to open a dialogue that helps organizations mitigate their impact on the environment and while better investing in their human capital.

Premise can create tasks that engage and inform the consumers about brands that have “sustainable initiatives” to ensure a safer environment. Each task can be designed to help Contributors not only actively seek out sustainable products but also capture if there is a shift in consumer behavior when consumers look to the other side of playing a passive role in saving the environment even if they have an additional cost to pay at the time of purchase.

Crowdsourcing can capture shifting consumer behaviors and changes in attitudes towards companies, and large chain stores specifically. While traditional brands may have been initially perceived as positive agents of change by bringing low-cost products to communities who historically had not had access to them, Premise can now show that inexpensive labor does so at a large price both environmentally and socially. In order to keep the goodwill necessary to compete, companies make positive changes in this regard and publicize these changes.

In fact, 58% of Premise Contributors have adjusted their routines or behaviors in order to live more sustainably. We can also capture which environmental issues concern our contributors the most, and how those issues evolve and change over time.

By keeping the public on their side, brands can keep their market share and revenues for their shareholder base, while doing better for the environment and their broader communities.

Premise can help you gauge the success of your ESG initiatives and identify areas of opportunity to improve upon them. Contact us today to learn more about how.

By Matt Lindner, Senior Content Marketing Manager

The back-to-school shopping season is in full swing. Retail businesses that are trying to make the transition back to school less hectic for shoppers in retail stores need to have their own actionable back-to-school shopping list ready to go.

There are a couple of reasons for that. Students are gradually starting to return to classrooms after a year of mostly remote learning. Given the rise of the Delta variant of the coronavirus, there’s likely still going to be some remote learning in place for some school districts across the country. That means products that haven’t traditionally been thought of as school supplies, such as masks and hand sanitizer, are going to be on school supply lists once again this year.

Also, people are spending more on back-to-school supplies this year. The National Retail Federation (NRF) reports that parents of kids in high school and younger will spend an average of $848.90 on back to school supplies. That’s 7.5% more per family than last year. Overall spending on back-to-school supplies is expected to reach $37.1 billion this year, up 9.4% from $33.9 billion last year.

With time running out in the season, which is expected to run through the end of August, retail businesses need to understand shoppers’ back-to-school shopping needs after a school year unlike any other.

The good news — Premise Data’s Contributors are poised and ready to help. Our Contributors, many of whom are the back-to-school shoppers you are trying to reach in urban, suburban, and rural areas, get paid to complete tasks every single day at a rate of 1 million per week. Our Contributors are ready, they’re engaged, and they’re motivated.

Here’s what should be on every retail business’s back-to-school shopping list this year:

• Compliance Checks: With COVID-19 lockdowns having lifted, store spending is expected to play a bigger role in overall back-to-school shopping this year. Brands need to ensure that their products are displayed properly in key stores or markets. Premise can work with you to create tasks in specific markets that show you, in real-time, how your products are being displayed and what adjustments need to be made.
• Inventory Checks: Nothing is more disappointing to a shopper than needing a specific product only to find that it’s out of stock in a particular store. Brands should create tasks aimed at helping them determine which products are available in which stores to help them identify where they might need to reallocate their resources.
• Price Monitoring: Good deals on some much needed school supplies get back-to-school shoppers excited. Improper pricing could turn a shopper off of your brand and onto a competitor’s. Brands should be creating price monitoring tasks in key markets to understand how their products are being priced in specific stores compared to their competitors and work with stores to make adjustments where appropriate.

Ready to accelerate your back-to-school sales results? Get in touch with us today.

By Samantha Hubner, Senior Consultant

Media literacy is an increasingly prevalent issue that impacts how people interpret information and perceive the world around them.

The spread of misinformation on social media in particular has eroded trust in healthcare, government, and other vital institutions.

In today’s world, media literacy affects every field, every person, at every hour of the day. As a technology company with extraordinary reach across the globe, Premise is invested in and committed to the ethical use of its capabilities as a force for good in people’s daily lives.

Promoting and improving online media literacy in the US and around the world is key to building stronger and healthier communities.

That’s why this week’s Task of the Week is about media literacy.

What is this task about?

Media literacy refers to the ability to think critically about information. It is a skill that requires you to analyze information from a variety of viewpoints and make judgments about the credibility, validity, and intentions of the information being presented.

Premise has successfully supported a number of clients around the world by creating tasks that assist in monitoring and identifying misinformation. The nature of these tasks has had a remarkable after effect: training and promoting better media literacy skills for our Contributor networks in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and eastern Europe.

This task is about creating an opportunity for our US Contributors to hone their own skills in media literacy, and in doing so, promote better media literacy practices within their communities.

How can Contributors complete this task?

• The task begins by presenting the Contributor with a few questions about key terminology regarding media literacy.
• After that, the task will transition to show several examples of social media accounts. For each example account, Contributors must identify the profile as either real or fake.
• These profiles come from two leading researchers in fighting disinformation at the Clemson University Media Forensics Lab.

Why should Contributors complete this task?

Premise Contributors actively use our platform to present key decision makers with critical insights on where policy changes, resources, and actions are most needed to make a positive impact on people’s lives. Media literacy is a key tenet of ensuring that positive impact.

Premise’s ongoing work in assessing market price fluctuations, emergency preparedness, media literacy, humanitarian aid delivery, environmental protection, public sentiment, and infrastructure mapping are just some examples of how we are using our platform to address core human security needs.

What we’ve learned so far

Premise has conducted a series of tasks around the world over the past year to understand how information about COVID-19 is messaged, received, and interpreted across different media. In doing so, Premise Contributors helped us uncover a great deal of insights regarding the troubling impacts of misinformation.

For instance, early on we learned that in Nigeria, “only around 30% of respondents had high levels of confidence in the accuracy of information coming from both state and national government and health authorities”. This was especially concerning with accompanying data indicating that 63% of respondents had personally heard a religious leader opposing social distancing as a prevention practice.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, one in every four contributors surveyed (26%) reported encountering misinformation about COVID-19 from April to May 2020, with online media being a leading culprit. Similar patterns were noticed in other survey collections in Yemen, and yet again in a more recent analysis of vaccine hesitancy in Ukraine.

Our efforts to better understand and combat misinformation by promoting media literacy are ongoing. As of July 31, an average of 57% of US Contributors were able to correctly identify the authenticity of one of the four example social media profiles.

By completing this task, we hope that you will have a better understanding of your own media literacy and an improved capacity to spot and stop the spread of misinformation.

Download the Premise app today on iOS or Android and start getting paid to complete fun activities.

Are you a business or organization interested in learning more about how we can help you uncover Data for Every Decision™? Contact us today.

By Fiore Riccobono, Communications Manager

As the country continues to mourn the tragic loss of life in a condo building collapse in Surfside, Fla., apartment dwellers are paying closer attention to their own living conditions.

Premise surveyed more than 1,800 people who live in either an apartment or a condo building across the US from July 4–7 about building safety.

We wanted to gauge:

• How aware people are of potential structural issues in their homes.
• What their concerns are.
• If they feel as though there are appropriate measures in place to have those concerns addressed.

What we learned is that most people who live in these buildings have serious concerns about their homes. What’s more — apartment and condo dwellers feel as though enough isn’t being done in their homes to address structural issues.

Here’s what we found:

• 65% have concerns about the building structure that they live in and its safety related to deteriorating materials or damage.
• 47% have seen damage never get fixed.
• 26% have seen damage fixed poorly.
• 27% of people feel their issues get ignored by the powers that be or feel as though they have no way of raising those issues to the point where they get acted upon.

This makes us ask: Who is responsible for making sure residential buildings are safe? Premise CEO Maury Blackman, says it best, “It’s logical to wonder: What’s next? How many older buildings in the rest of Florida are in disrepair and in danger of another collapse due to their vulnerability to severe weather conditions?”

Building codes, state and municipal inspection programs, and state laws governing homeowners associations (HOAs) offer several lines of defense against structural failure. The codes in particular are stringent and have improved significantly in recent decades, as has the technology used to raise buildings.

While these safety nets failed the residents of Surfside, Premise Data has the technology to properly identify the concerns of others living in apartment, condominium, and other high rise buildings.

Cities can enlist gig workers to use their phones to inspect at-risk buildings. After all, buildings are designed to give warning signals before larger issues including, ultimately, collapsing arise.

The first step would be training condo residents on the potential signs that their building could be unsafe. Training on what to look for and where to go would be self-guided and straightforward.

Here’s how it could work:

• Instructions on gig inspectors’ phones would help direct them to areas of the building that need to be photographed, how they need to be photographed, and other observations that they need to record.
• All data from these surveys would be instantly transmitted to a data center and shared with relevant authorities.
• With computer vision technology, authorities could identify particularly vulnerable buildings and schedule follow-up visits by professional engineers.

A sloped floor could indicate that a column has moved, while a door that will not close might mean the building’s frame is warped.

Teaching residents about these structural red flags and then empowering them to report what they perceive to be at-risk infrastructure could ease the concerns of the 65% of people who live in condos and prevent future tragedies.

Want to learn more about how Premise can turn your residents into your greatest allies when it comes to identifying issues in and around your developments? Get in touch with us today.

By Mike Strauss, Director of Asia-Pacific

Premise has been collecting data in more than 100 countries to understand pandemic concerns and the changes communities have undertaken to manage COVID-19.

One trend we’ve been noticing is that concerns about COVID-19 impacting people’s livelihood have been fluctuating around the world since the World Health Organization declared it a global pandemic in March of 2020.

As cases spread around the globe from centralized urban hubs, to rural corners of the developing world, community concern would rise and wane with the preventative measures imposed by governments and health officials. Once vaccines became a tool for governments to manage cases, the dynamics of educating citizens about COVID-19 have shifted into a realm mixed with misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, and varying trust in global institutions.

Regionally, we’ve seen shifts in those concerns as outbreaks occur amongst varying pockets of the world. Examples include when COVID-19 cases spiked in the US and UK in the fall and winter of 2020; in India in April 2021; and in Italy in March and November of 2020.

The latest outbreak getting significant media attention is occurring in Indonesia, as officials scramble to manage fast rising case counts and vaccinate the public. Despite vaccines being available in Indonesia since January, less than 7% of the population is fully vaccinated. While vaccine hesitancy is not unique to Indonesia, the timeline of sentiment towards vaccination is important to understand.

While the pace of vaccination has been relatively slow and steady, Premise was able to detect a significant spike in the public’s willingness to be vaccinated. This was preempted with a significant increase in the number of concerned citizens about the spread of COVID, before local and international media sources began reporting on the rising number of cases.

While the increase in Indonesians’ willingness to be vaccinated has to be a welcome sign for health professionals, another complicated factor at play during this outbreak is the preference towards the different vaccines available.

When vaccines were first made available in January, much of the country remained uncertain about which vaccine citizens trusted to protect them against COVID-19. By June, nearly every region of the country ranked the Chinese made Sinovac vaccine as the most trustworthy. But even before the current outbreak, questions surrounding the efficacy of the Sinovac vaccine were causing concern amongst international health experts, that it may not be as effective as the alternative Pfizer and Astrazeneca versions being offered.

Looking at data from July as cases spike across the country, sentiment towards vaccines is shifting back to undecided, in many regions across Indonesia, or in some areas, shifting towards Pfizer and Astrazeneca.

Understanding barriers to vaccination, hesitancy and misinformation is another element critical to combating COVID-19. Through sentiment surveys and online tasks that ask contributors to document content found in private social media and texting apps, Premise can help clients understand local problems and sources of information and influence.

Armed with that knowledge, our clients can plan and implement corrective solutions before the next outbreak occurs.

Want to learn more? Get in touch with us today.

By Theo Reuter, Geospatial Data Scientist

A key aspect of Premise as a crowd empowered platform is the geospatial data that we collect from around the world. This data has locational components such as latitude and longitude which provide opportunities for insightful, value-added analysis. At Premise the privacy and safety of our users is paramount and so we rigorously anonymize our data, allowing us to perform subnational analysis while protecting our users’ privacy.

The Problem with Geospatial Data

A major challenge when it comes to working with geospatial data is that it can be very computationally expensive. Failure to optimize these calculations can cost time and money. With over 2.75 million unique contributors making over 100M+ submissions to date, processing and analyzing this data quickly is essential.

One way the Premise data science team has focused on turning this wealth of data into products for our customers is by creating a demographics dataset that aggregates our demographic data to administrative boundaries at different levels, i.e., national or state/province. This gives us breakdowns of demographic information such as ethnicity, language, religion, and more as seen in the example above.

What We Did

We turned to Google BigQuery in order to perform high speed geospatial calculations on a global scale. This allowed us to address diverse data needs to include synthesizing up to hundreds of millions of records and eliminating potential processing bottlenecks.

With data scattered across different projects and multiple tables, we needed to incorporate global population, geospatial tables, anonymized user locations and history, and the results of our demographic data into one table.

We had previously analyzed this data using Google Colab python notebooks which necessitated running the notebook 1000+ times due to memory limitations of the service.

We wanted to achieve global coverage in a single step, necessitating a different environment. An additional challenge this analysis posed is that it would require millions of spatial joins, or where you join pieces of data that are in the same place or region. This tends to be very computationally expensive.

Why BigQuery was the Ideal Solution

With Contributors moving as they go about their lives, we needed to process user behavior and make sure we would assign them to the correct state or district to ensure accuracy in our demographic breakdowns. BigQuery provided a solution to all of our challenges for this analysis.

Features of BigQuery made it an obvious choice for this challenge. It helped us seamlessly utilize Google Cloud’s scalable memory while allowing us to process our data quickly at a global scale. In the process, we were able to dramatically speed up the millions of spatial joins we had to do.

The depth of features and flexibility in BigQuery would allow us to perform all calculations from sample size calculations to margins of error and confidence intervals inside the platform. For instance, we had to combine user locations with global time zones and process many points of location information for users to assign them to the correct regions.

What We Learned

The end result was that we offloaded all major computation to BQ with a SQL query combining population data, contributor submission data, our geospatial tables, and user information.

We selected demographic data only from recently active users, conducted a spatial join to determine the administrative area a user belonged to so we could aggregate data, aggregated the data with group bys, and then utilized our population data to calculate margins of error and confidence intervals for our data.

Processing demographic data involved touching tables including over 146 million rows totaling over 731 GB of data. By using BigQuery and optimizing our SQL we only processed 3.9GB and it took a mere 12 seconds to complete what took weeks during the pilot. Our user location queries processed over 8TB of data in under 10 minutes.

These rapid calculations will allow us to keep our global demographic product updated in near real time, providing a better customer experience and freeing the data science team to focus on improving the product instead of simply trying to complete the analysis.

The project is a prime example of how Premise Data is leveraging tools in the Google Cloud to efficiently create global products for our clients. Our next projects involve utilizing the H3 spatial index libraries built into BigQuery as a different approach to aggregating safety data.

The behind the scenes work Google does allows us as Data Scientists to focus on creating value added products and synthesizing varied data sources, freeing us to utilize computationally expensive geospatial functions and process terabytes of data in minutes thanks to Google’s infrastructure.

Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we can save you time and money by developing long term solutions to your most pressing business problems.

By Matt Lindner, Senior Content Marketing Manager

Premise’s growth is being driven by employees that bring a diverse array of backgrounds and skills to our company.

Every year, thousands of people join the Peace Corps to drive change in developing nations. They travel to remote locations around the world, learn about new cultures, work with a diverse group of people, and develop new skills that help set them up for future career success.

In today’s edition of our Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Spotlight, we talk to Annalise Miller, International Development Customer Success Operations Specialist, about her Peace Corps experience.

How long have you been at Premise?

Since April 2021.

What do you do here at Premise?

I brainstorm, develop, build, launch, and manage tasks and data collection for our International Development clients to provide them with the data they need for every decision!

How long were you in the Peace Corps for?

Just under two years. I was evacuated during the global evacuation of all volunteers due to COVID-19 just two months before I was set to complete my service.

Where did you serve?

Namibia, in the northwestern region of Omusati on the Angolan border.

Tell us more about your experience — What did you do, and what was your favorite part about the experience?

As a Community Economic Development Volunteer, my work primarily focused on encouraging entrepreneurship, teaching business skills, and working with existing small businesses.

Throughout my service, I developed a suite of solutions to address high rates of unemployment among young adults. These programs included regional business plan competitions between trade schools; a weeklong interactive entrepreneurship youth camp focused on instilling the foundational skills necessary to be a successful entrepreneur; business skills workshops; a nationwide entrepreneurship curriculum review; and financial and computer literacy courses.

Outside of these entrepreneurship and business focused projects, I volunteered at a local elementary school, painted world and Namibia map murals, ran a weeklong girls empowerment camp and led the committee that produced original digital content and managed all Peace Corps Namibia social media accounts.

My favorite part of the entire Peace Corps experience is hard to pinpoint. However, my experience would have not been the same without people I met and the sense of community I felt. Namibians welcomed me with open arms into their families and homes time and time again, despite language barriers and plenty of cultural faux pas I surely committed. I experienced what is best described through the phrase Ubuntu, a Zulu phrase from South Africa which means, “I am, because you are.”

The feeling of interconnectedness and communal responsibility for one another in every aspect of life made my experience richer than I could have ever imagined, and it created a new extension of what I consider home. These connections and relationships allowed me to be successful in all of the projects and work I described above, without relationships I would not have accomplished any of those things. I gained a deep understanding of the value of a relationship focused approach to community development, and that I will always carry with me.

How has the Peace Corps helped you in your career?

I believe each experience provides a new lens through which we view the world. As we collect experiences, we add more lenses to our collection and we diversify our perspective. Serving in the Peace Corps provided me with a unique lens and deep understanding of living and working in an unfamiliar culture and context.

This understanding paired with the resilience and flexibility developed by volunteers during their service (and in my case during evacuation) has prepared me to be successful in a multitude of professional contexts despite ambiguity, competing priorities and tight deadlines. It also gave me a great sense of humor and plenty of experiences to draw on that speak to my skills and talents as a potential employee that are highly unique and fare well in interviews!

What lessons from the Peace Corps do you bring to your role at Premise?

The list never ends! Throughout my (so far) short time at Premise I continuously see ways that my Peace Corps experience applies to my role.

As with any tech startup, the ability to be flexible and creatively solve problems has been extremely valuable here. I often joke that I have done more with less, but in reality, having done work at the grassroots level with very few resources taught me to think even more creatively and to remember that no barrier or road block is too high to overcome, you just have to look at it from a different perspective to find the way forward.

Specifically in my role on the International Development team, a deep understanding of cultural awareness and contextual information is very helpful. It allows me to think about the tasks and data from the perspective of our Contributors, and frame things in a way that will result in the highest quality of data possible for our clients.

And last but certainly not least, my time in the Peace Corps has connected me deeply to our mission here at Premise. I saw first hand how having accurate and timely data at the ground level can dramatically impact and improve programming and services and in turn, dramatically improve individual lives. This is something that keeps me grounded in the work we do here, the reminder that the data we collect empowers our clients to make informed decisions that will then best serve their constituents.

What would you say to someone who is thinking about joining the Peace Corps?

The biggest lessons I learned from my Peace Corps experience came at unexpected times, in unexpected places, and were none of the things I thought I might learn. Be prepared to have your values, view of the world, and privilege challenged in the best ways possible. But most importantly go with an open mind, without expectations, and with the understanding that you will learn far more than you could ever offer. Cherish each moment and opportunity to grow.

Please reach out if you want to learn more about how we can help you apply data to every important organizational decision you make. If you’re a job seeker, please check out our careers page to see our current opportunities.