Introducing data

What is data?

Data is not just personal information – it is anything you can count or check to find out something useful about what’s happening, or what has been happening. Examples that charities might use are:

• How many people did we help last month?
• Which support method has the highest success rate?
• How many people read our emails?

Even with questions like these, context is everything. Numbers or facts on their own don’t mean much until you put them into context. For example, understanding whether helping 200 people a month is a busy or a quiet month, or if 30% of young people supported finding long-term work is a good or bad figure.

Why is data useful?

Data is useful because it helps us make decisions. It helps organisations understand which programmes and techniques are most effective. It can also help us spot patterns in the lives of the people we work with and think about ways to help them more effectively. And you can use data to show funders and other supporters that your work is making a difference.

But data won’t tell the story on its own. You need to start with a question or a hypothesis – an educated guess about how the world might be, that you can test and validate with data. Once you have your questions or hypothesis, you set some parameters – for example, collecting data on a particular service over a six-week period.

Getting started: first, forget about data

You’re unlikely to find high-impact uses of your data just by looking at it. Instead, make a list of your organisation’s challenges and needs. Think about what would make your job easier or your organisation more effective.

Once you’ve articulated those challenges, you can begin to identify which of them would benefit from data-driven techniques. For example, instead of the broad and vague question ‘How many people did we help last month?’ you could ask some more focussed questions like:

• Is the number of people we are helping each month increasing or decreasing? What other data or information might we need to understand this trend?
• Is anything changing about the situation of the people we are helping? For example, are they coming to us earlier or later in their journey?

Don’t worry about getting it all right all at once! Instead, start small, with one key insight that is useful, relevant, and will spark that lightbulb moment for your colleagues – particularly those whose buy-in you need.

Look back at the list of challenges you made. They might be:

• getting a better understanding of the people your organisation works with
• evaluating the impact of your programmes
• or improving operational efficiency

Where could using data add the most value? And, crucially, which information will be most useful to decision-makers?

Whatever it is, work towards getting to one answer and then flaunt it! Showing your colleagues that something useful can come from data is the best way to get traction for your work. You can worry about the bigger systems (the “plumbing”) and your wider data strategy later on, once you’ve got some interest and buy-in.

Starting with a small, powerful insight will also help your team see the power of data to support decisions, rather than feeling blinded by statistics.

What to do now

1. Work out what you want to know – what really matters for your organisation?
2. Start with a small, achievable project and use that to gain confidence

This guide was written by John Fitzgerald and Giselle Cory. We’re grateful to DataKind UK for their help with this resource. DataKind UK helps charities and the social sector to gain a better understanding of their data. If you think that DataKind UK could help your organisation with its data question(s), take a look at the free support they offer here.

If you'd like to learn more about all things data, you can watch nearly 70 workshops, how-tos, and panel discussions from the Data4Good Festival 2021 on YouTube.