Collecting better data for communities with Product Women

It all started with a data-hackathon.

On March 2019, Civita organised a data-hackathon called Hackt for Equity in STEM.

Gathering in one of the main rooms of the Engineering building of UTS, the Civita team and more than 30 volunteers worked the whole afternoon on several challenges for social good. Among them, the well-known Sydney community Product Women had come to the afternoon with one question: how can we create a better tracking of our meetups participation?

The reason why this question was close to their heart came from the main success metric of the organisation: bringing more women on board in tech and product management. Measuring and tracking the attendees behaviours, the retention rate and their profiles would act as a proxy for their success measurement.

A community to empower women in tech

“Product Women community is an organisation helping to empower women in Tech especially Product Management. We encourage women speakers to take to stage, speaking on different topics in Product management, provide a supporting network of peers and mentors.” wrote Lipi Sharma, one of the main organisers of the community. “The Civita hackt helped Product Women Sydney by providing a data tool to collect information from their meetups to analyse and utilize this data for better outreach,marketing and database support.”

The team had an incredible energy and knowledge that was key for the success of the project. Geoff, Eduardo, Ridwan and Stina decided to tackle three key questions:

• How the meetings have progressed since the start of the meetup
• What format works best and if the members come back to the next meetups
• How the meetup organisers can improve the data collection on the longer term

The results

Using the Meetup API, they built a dashboard with Google Dashboard and were able to share an intuitive data story to Lipi. “The team involvement in trying to understand the core problem any organisation/topic faces was fascinating. I was amazed to see the members take a genuine interest in understanding customer problems, creating role play and understanding different scenarios to provide better solution. I think the team was a fantastic group of professionals who understood customers problems and were able to deliver it in an outstanding solution.”

Do you want to know how you can collect data and report it better for your community? Get in touch with our team.