Let’s Party (and Make Decisions) with Data!

Can reviewing data produce a lot of fun – plus insight? East Metro Pulse data parties suggest the response of “yes” to that question.

A team organized by the Saint Paul and Minnesota Community Foundations and Wilder Research (Nadege Souvenir, Nicole MartinRogers, Sheila Bell, Adam Murray, and Mary Kay Bailey) has offered partygoers at a series of events the opportunity to use the East Metro Pulse survey’s rich source of information on housing, health, education, employment, and other topics. In addition, they describe how to combine East Metro Pulse results with demographics and other information from Minnesota Compass and other reliable sources. 

Nonprofit organizations, foundations, government agencies, and anyone with a passion for improving community life – all can benefit by learning how to use data to enable better planning, evaluation, fund-raising, advocacy, and grant making. 

Making Decisions Based on Data

What constitutes the world’s most valuable resource? Data – according to The Economist.

For-profit organizations adeptly use data to understand their markets, determine the best sites for profitable operations, and develop new products. Sometimes, they even use data proactively to influence preferences to favor their products. Companies that rely on data increase productivity, perform better financially, reduce risks, and make faster decisions.

Why shouldn’t nonprofits do the same in their quest to fulfill their missions? As we in the nonprofit sector work to improve the lives of people, can we channel the world’s most valuable resource toward the good?

Another question with the response of “yes”! 

Many opportunities exist to use data. If we want to improve the quality of life of our communities, we need to take advantage of those opportunities.

Personal Data Literacy

Effective use of information requires data literacy for the people who make decisions. Most of us have good common sense that points us toward questions that have strategic and practical importance. For example:

• What implications do changes in our community (aging, racial diversification, employment trends, etc.) have for our organization?
• What needs do our clients have? Are those needs changing?
• How much of the community do we reach with our work? How much do we miss?
• Do we get the most productivity we can? How can we improve?

Answers to those questions require data. But how do we find data that have the accuracy and validity that we need? And once we find those data, how can we make sure that we examine them and analyze them correctly?

For effective leadership in today’s world, we need data literacy skills to know good data from bad data. We need skills to derive insight from a large amount of information. We need skills to portray data and communicate credible messages.

How much competency does each of us need? That depends. Using an analogy to home repairs, I know enough to bang in a nail or do a small touch up with paint. But for anything beyond a certain size, I better call a carpenter or a painter, lest my activities lead to disaster. Similarly for using data, we all have our limitations beyond which we need to call an expert. But we can learn to do a lot on our own.

Organizational Features

Capacity also depends on organizational culture and expectations. The policies of an organization should promote the use of information in support of its mission and vision. Staff should see that the organization for which they work (whether paid or volunteer) will make decisions and allocate resources based on information, not based on haphazard or ephemeral considerations. Leaders within all levels of an organization must champion the use of data and nurture their staff’s competence to use data. An organization must commit itself to quantitatively measuring its performance, if it desires to improve its performance through data-based decisions.

Effective use of data also requires organizational capacity. Capacity depends upon a suitable technical system in place to manage and report data in useable formats. For one organization, such a “system” might amount to nothing more than a laptop with easy-to-use spreadsheet software. Another organization, however, might need a complex database managed by specially trained staff. Fortunately, organizations today can find much software – some free, some at nominal cost – which enables them to analyze data in ways that would have required expensive, complex processes even just a decade ago.

Building Personal Skills by Data-Partying

That brings me back to the data party. With the tutelage of Souvenir and MartinRogers, participants learn some basic best practices about using data, dig into the East Metro Pulse data, and practice how they might use the data in their work through facilitated activities (as illustrated here). For example, in one data party that I attended we looked at how data on employment barriers, taken from the community survey, demonstrated the efficacy of having an accessible outreach worker who could directly enable job-seekers to overcome those barriers. It offered strong evidence for a data-based decision that could justify funding.

Wilder Research and the foundations we work with on Minnesota Compass, East Metro Pulse, and other initiatives seek to make data available as freely and accessibly as possible to everyone from the smallest community-based organization to the largest charitable institution. Combining program evaluation data with community survey data with demographic trends data can create a potent force for organizational improvement, social equity, and positive community change.

So, let’s party !!