Позитивные изменения. Том 2, № 2 (2022). Positive changes. Volume 2, Issue 2 (2022)

The Clean Games have become an eco-franchise, with communities of organizers in the regions receiving free training and learning the project methodology after signing a non-profit agreement. In 2020, the project team raised 25.217 million rubles in grants and subsidies, corporate orders, government contracts, and donations from legal entities and individuals.

The project organizers say their mission is to give people an opportunity to see the problems of environmental pollution and raise the public awareness about environmental issues in game format. The project methodology allows the participants to see the problems of pollution and the benefits of waste separation and recycling. Learning to sort waste through the game, people start thinking about the environmental agenda.

The organizers have defined the following key performance indicators for the project: the number of participants and volunteers, the number of events held, social media coverage, mass media publication activity, and the funds raised (Vainer, 2021). These indicators are deemed to be useful for assessing the operational performance of the project, but they are only partially related to assessing the progress towards the project goal, namely raising awareness and increasing public engagement in the environmental agenda.

THE EXPERIENCES OF THE PARTICIPANTS AND ORGANIZERS OF THE CLEAN GAMES PROJECT: MOTIVES, ATTITUDES, EXPECTATIONS

In 2021, the Center for Public Initiatives Assessment of the National Research University Higher School of Economics conducted a research project "Motivations and Environmental Attitudes of Volunteers in the Clean Games Project" and published an analytical report.

More than two thirds of the Clean Games participants interviewed had prior volunteering experience, but those were generally one-off volunteer activities and targeted help. For more than a half of the respondents, this was their first experience participating in the project. As the researchers pointed out, the public engagement levels proved that participation in the Clean Games had become a broadly encouraging activity, something the participants were proud of and tended to tell their loved ones about.

Participation in the Clean Games had become a broadly encouraging activity, something the participants were proud of and tended to tell their loved ones about.

The regional project organizers were also interviewed. It turned out they were much more into environmental activism: all of them had past experience in social projects, and all of them were concerned about environmental issues.

However, the data collected in the pilot study could not be interpreted in statistical terms, due to the small and unrepresentative sample. Moreover, conducting a representative survey of all the Clean Games participants appears to be extremely time-consuming (the sample size would be comparable to nationwide surveys and would require zoning by participating teams). Assessing the perception of the environmental agenda also requires a more serious methodology, which drives the survey costs up. Therefore, one of the most rational ways to use qualitative data is through secondary analysis based on the contribution analysis methodology.

CONTRIBUTION ANALYSIS

Designing a study based on contribution analysis requires a focus on the change agent, with a description of the history of changes provided by the research subjects themselves. By interacting with the interviewer, the significance of the intervention for the object of social impact becomes apparent.

The contribution analysis methodology includes a method of logging the qualitative assessment of the impact (Copestake, 2014). The essence is to ask the informant what changes occurred in their life in the course of the project, without focusing on the project itself and its content. This way, the researchers can use biographical information to gain access to causal relationships, as perceived by the informant, which can be used to describe the qualitative effects of the social impact. For example, this method was used during an evaluation of development projects in African agricultural communities.