The future of business is all about Big Data. From social media metrics to buying preferences to time management, there are ways to measure and quantify so many aspects of our daily lives that it can feel like you are entering The Matrix. There’s a lot of talk about wanting to shift nonprofit work to be data-driven, but also little actual understanding of what that would look like in practice or even how to get started. Through my training with the Nonprofit Technology Empowerment Network, I’ve come to think about the concept of a data-driven culture in a whole new way.
There are several stages of having data-informed decision-making at any organization and the first place to start is to understand how data functions and where and with whom it lives (and dies). For many organizations, there are a tangle of different data systems being used across the organizations. These can be touch everything from functionality such as email and budgets to departmental operations like program management, communications, and fundraising. In addition, both quantitative and qualitative data is often collected in very different ways and contained within departments.
Taking the time to make a data map to understand the architecture (intentional and unintentional) of data can provide the information needed to have collaborative and cross-departmental conversations about how data is managed. This mapping exercise will allow you to gain perspective about what opportunities and challenges exist when investigating how to have data-driven decision-making.
As suggested by Rahul Bhargava, data needs to address four main criteria.
Organized- data needs to have a consistent structure
Well Described- data needs to documented and easy to locate
Accessible- data needs to be available for staff to find AND use
Usable- data needs to be in a format that can be exported, manipulated, and stored
When assessing data architecture consider how data is impacted by all four of these criteria. For example, if you use Constant Contact for your weekly email newsletter to donors what is the process facilitating the unsubscribes and donor preferences in your fundraising database? Additionally, does your budgeting worksheets allow for new categories to be created when needed or do you have to shoehorn expenses into lines?
Additionally, organizations can be impacted very differently depending on their use of data. A data-centric organization places data at the center of all group decision-making. A data-driven organization takes it a step further and allows data to dictate directions. Finally, a data-informed organization uses data to provide information to decisions but as only one input.
How do these three approaches to data use differ in practice?
Consider a local outdoor educational organization that is considering canceling, growing, or maintaining a weekly wildlife talk. The data set indicates that attendance has varied seasonally over the past two years.
The data-centric approach would focus the group decision-making. Perhaps the organization would decide to only offer the workshops during the times of year that have seen the most attendance and cease operation the rest of the year.
The data-driven reaction could result in the cancellation of all workshops that fail to meet a precise number of attendees perhaps based on the cost of operations.
The data-informed response would bring the data along with other information such as weather, the variety of topics and presenters, other competing activities, and fee structure into the conversation to help guide decision-making.
Having a clear and articulated idea of your organization’s data architecture as well as the placement of data in your planning can help transform both your operations and your outcomes.
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