People Helping People
To us, entrepreneurship is about taking your passion and turning it into an organization, to share your passion with the world. Equal To’s mission is to empower minority-owned and women-owned businesses by providing the understanding and tools needed to make data-driven decisions. In short, though, it’s simple: people helping people.
When we started talking about the concept of Equal To, we looked to close networks for our first client. It only made sense to approach an organization whose mission resonated with what we wanted to do. Enter, Electric Girls. Electric Girls was (and is) an organization close to our hearts. Their mission is to develop girls into confident innovators and leaders in technology, and they do so by teaching girls STEM skills and social-emotional mindsets, such as building circuits and strengthening problem solving skills.
We had been volunteering with Electric Girls for a few months before we approached their founder and Executive Director, Flor Serna,with our pitch: let us build out your data. Without entirely knowing what she was getting into, Flor agreed, and we set off to prove how data can change an organization.
Specifically, we told her we wanted to build out her entire data structure: cleaning and formalizing all existing data, creating standard practices to use moving forward, formalizing the data intake process from campers, and leveraging Microsoft Power BI for data visualization and analysis. We also offered trainings and ongoing data maintenance to ensure the transition to a data-driven mindset was a smooth one.
Now, Electric Girls is running with a strong data foundation and a mature understanding of not only how to interpret data, but how to make decisions based on those data insights. These insights play a primary role in tracking campers’ individual growth and progress, creating deliverables to share with donors and the community, and understanding Electric Girl’s growth and impact on the community. Flor is now a self-proclaimed data-addict as she continues to lead Electric Girls.
“Reevaluating our data collection and evaluation processes has revealed to us what is and isn’t working in our programming — it’s empowered us to understand our organization’s impact in every way possible,” says Flor.
It all comes down to people helping people. We recognized a skillset we had that we could leverage in assisting startups in their own growth, and we’re excited to offer these services to help entrepreneurs grow their passions. People helping people. This is our way of changing the world, one data set at a time.
