Principals Speak Platform | Global School Leaders
Scaling a digital storytelling platform capturing school leader voices and integrating it with survey data to strengthen leadership insights and advocacy across countries
Education, Social Impact
Communications, Knowledge Management
Dots is allowing us to hear directly from school principals, right from their 'desks'. By listening to these stories, we've been able to advocate for essential system conditions that governments, funders, and multinational organizations need to focus on to support school leadership and build resilient school systems
About the partner
Global School Leaders (GSL) is an international nonprofit dedicated to strengthening school leadership ecosystems to improve student learning outcomes across the Global South.
GSL works with local partners to support school leadership development programs, build a robust evidence base, and drive systemic change. Since its inception, GSL has supported over 13,000 school leaders across 14 countries.
Goal of the study
The Principals Speak platform is designed as a digital storytelling solution to capture and share stories from school leaders about their on-ground challenges, lived realities, and impact on school communities.
By integrating qualitative stories with quantitative survey data in one platform, GSL aims to move beyond isolated narratives to generate evidence that informs learning, advocacy, and decision-making across countries
Outcome of the study
With Dots, GSL tracks leadership trends across regions, generating actionable insights for partners and funders. These insights strengthen advocacy by pairing real principal voices with supporting data, enabling more informed decisions on education programs and policy
Needs for GSL Team
1
A structured digital storytelling system to collect qualitative experiences from school leaders across regions, themes, and programs
2
Mobile-first data collection to make participation simple and inclusive for school leaders
3
A centralized, accessible knowledge repository to enable cross-country learning, and reduce silos
4
Analysis tools to turn qualitative data into insight-driven narratives for communications, advocacy, and program improvement
Solution Snapshot
1
Built a digital storytelling platform to collect and organize principal stories across countries, themes, and programs, creating a centralized knowledge repository
2
Enabled mobile-friendly data collection through an integrated WhatsApp chatbot with multi-lingual support making it easy for school leaders to share stories on the go
3
Supported AI-powered mixed-methods analysis at scale through AI-assisted annotations and conversational querying
The platform's availability in five languages is one of its greatest strengths, enabling us to reach school leaders across regions. Principals Speak allows them to share their own stories and explore those from different contexts in a language they’re most comfortable with, building a shared sense of community.
Storytelling templates
Configurable templates to collect structured qualitative data, with built-in hints that guide school leaders through different dimensions of their stories
Helps principals provide richer, more reflective stories, improves data consistency, and makes it easier to generate structured insights across programs
AI Annotation
Automatically identifies and tags key ideas and themes across qualitative stories and survey responses submitted by school leaders
Enables GSL to analyze hundreds of multilingual responses consistently, surface patterns faster, and reduce manual coding effort
Annotation Explorer
A visual interface to explore coded qualitative data across countries, themes, and demographics
Allows teams and partners to compare experiences across regions, identify gaps, and direct attention to areas needing targeted intervention
Ask AI
Explore qualitative and quantitative data through conversational queries
Helps teams quickly find emerging patterns and themes across stories and survey responses, without needing specialist analysis or manual effort
Dashboards & Reports
Response-level and overview dashboards with breakdowns and filters to explore data by country or demographics
Integrated insights from Principals Speak and PULS inform comprehensive reports that support evidence-based advocacy and stakeholder engagement across countries
Having a template versus a blank page has allowed school principals to think about different dimensions of their story and go beyond simply 'describing' to also sometimes reflecting. Having hints allows them to add detail where required and have the necessary guidance they need to fill out each section