Ala’a Issa, Sydney Stevenson, and Meri Ghorkhmazyan presented at MAXDAYS 2025 on “From Data to Decisions: Mercy Corps’ Experience with MAXQDA.” Mercy Corps helps communities survive crises and works globally. Mercy Corps adopted MAXQDA. They currently have 40 MAXQDA floating licenses! Issa shared this information and introduced case studies. The first one was program performance and evaluation in Uganda and Nepal. The team coded 1,837 segments! Issa shared how the team has used MAXMAPS for visualization of the relationships and data exploration/organization. The team used word clouds to explore word frequency from focus group discussions, for example. Issa spoke about the pros of MAXMAPS and AI Assist. In the future, they want to use automatic transcriptions and context analysis. Stevenson spoke about an analysis they conducted an analysis of their annual report. They have four main areas: food security, water security, economic opportunity, and peace and good governance. For the context analysis, Stevenson noted that they coded for conflict and climate change as drivers of vulnerability. The organizational strategy analysis ended up using AI Assist, Stevenson mentioned. Mercy Corps developed an internal AI bot using documents that were also imported into MAXQDA to use AI tools. The strength of the AI chatbot was working with specific documents for summaries. Chatting with the listed text segments was used to understand sets of documents from specific regions. Stevenson noted that developing a workflow helped fine-tune prompts and analyses. Stevenson also emphasized “sense-making is critical when combining other methodologies.” Ghorkhmazyan explained that developing the strategy helped ask new questions and explore new datasets quickly. They noted that training participants on generating meaningful MAXMAPS is challenging. This was a good session to learn about the applications of different MAXQDA tools.
