Development organizations spend months designing studies, recruiting participants, training field teams, and traveling to remote communities to collect qualitative data. The recordings that come back from that work are often the richest, most direct evidence of program impact that exists. They contain beneficiary voices in their own words, unprompted observations about what's working and what isn't, and context that no survey instrument can capture. Then those recordings sit on a laptop while the donor report deadline approaches and nobody has figured out what to do with them. Transcription is the step that most development organizations treat as an afterthought and then scramble to fix at the end of a project. This post makes the case for treating it as infrastructure instead.

Microsoft Teams has become the default video platform for a large part of the research world, particularly in institutions, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and universities where Microsoft 365 is already standard. If your participants are already using Teams for their day-to-day work, running a focus group on Teams reduces friction significantly. They don't need to download anything new or create a new account.

Most IRB protocols get sent back for revision on the data security and management sections, and within those sections, transcription is the specific area where protocols most frequently fall short. The reasons are consistent: researchers describe their interview methodology in careful detail, specify their analysis software, and then write a single sentence about transcription that doesn't address who's doing it, what compliance standards the vendor meets, how files will be transferred, where they'll be stored, or when they'll be deleted.