How PPI Malaysia Utilized Data to Become a Better Organization
Author : Matthew Farant
Have you ever feel annoyed when someone starts to give you a bunch of data buzzwords? It mustn’t be your first time to hear sentences like “data is the new oil” or “the era of AI and machine learning is here”. Indeed, these techy lexicons will make you sound cooler than usual. But instead of just saying it, do you actually know how data and all of its magical powers can help everybody to do anything, even as simple as helping a student organization to grow?
Yes, you read that right! Working with data doesn’t always mean that you need to be a certified data scientist or analyst in a tech company. You can work with data and do a lot of data analysis in any situation, and that’s what we do in PPI Malaysia.
Who are we?
Persatuan Pelajar Indonesia — Malaysia (PPI-M) is a non-profit organization supervised by the Indonesian Embassy in Malaysia for Indonesian students who are pursuing their studies in Malaysia. Our aim is to strengthen the bonds of Indonesian students in Malaysia and proactively encouraging them to contribute their ideas and innovation.
We realize that in a more digitalized world, it is important for us to deliver data-driven programs to our committees and members. Therefore, this year, PPI-M is forming a new team called “Biro Pusat Data dan Informasi” or Pusdatin. Pusdatin is a special bureau responsible to provide a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) for students-related data and analyze it to help the development of PPI-M.
Most of the time, our only source of data is from surveys that we distributed to our members (Indonesian students in Malaysia). The main challenge is how do we use a limited amount of the data to gain meaningful insights. You might think that we’ve done a lot of mundane tasks like preparing excel spreadsheets, but we didn’t. So let’s have a glimpse of our data analysis use-cases below!
Use-Cases
- PPI-M Committee Database & Dashboard
This was one of our first projects as a team. The goal of this project is to create a database of this year’s (and probably next few years) PPI-M committees alongside its visualization dashboard that will be published as a form of public transparency. By creating this dashboard, we’ve helped other departments to plan their programs and events that are related to our committees. We created this dashboard by gathering personal data from our committees that will be cleaned later and visualized using Microsoft Power BI. One of the challenges of making this dashboard was cleaning the data (especially text data like university name or faculty name).
- Mid — Year Evaluation
After working for 6 months, we conducted an evaluation survey to all the PPI-M committees, including the board of directors, coordinators, and department members. The evaluation survey was meant to evaluate the satisfaction of our commitment towards their performance and peers, which will make it easier for us to improve for the next 6 months. Rather than using the classic pie chart visualization from Google Form, we made some Tableau visualizations and put them in a presentation deck that was presented in the mid-year evaluation meeting. One of the most exciting parts about making these visualizations was processing the text data of “Kritik dan Saran” into a colorful word cloud, instead of just displaying a bunch of raw texts on the presentation slide. In this case, we used a little bit of R to do both the data preparation and the word cloud.
3. Database PPI-M (On-going Project)
Database PPI-M is simply a system of student data tables that we maintain to fulfill certain organizational needs, both for internal planning or external reporting (e.g. Indonesian Embassy, PPI Dunia, etc). Some examples of PPI-M major events that utilized this database were Edufair, conducted by the education department to promote Malaysian universities to Indonesian graduates, and the social service program (Bansos) for Indonesian students under quarantine in Malaysia. Currently, our goal for this database is to create a secured login system and encourage more students to register themselves into our database.
What we’ve learned
As a bureau that has been operating for several months, we’ve learned a lot of things aside from making fancy dashboards.
“If you’re nothing without the suit, then you shouldn’t have it.” — Tony Stark
I’m a big spider-man fan and this quote above really resonates with me as a member of the team. One of the key takeaways from our journey is how do we make data such a powerful tool, even if we have a limited amount of it or even if we only got it from a Google Form survey. We may not have the best or biggest student database, but there are still a lot of exciting things that we can do!
Yes, data is the new oil, but the question that we need to answer is: how do we turn oil into a useful source of energy to boost our quality as an organization?
Maintaining Data Quality
Being a member of Pusdatin is not just about doing sophisticated data analysis. It also teaches us how to maintain data quality. This is because the data that we used didn’t magically appear from nowhere, meaning that we need to gather it from a certain source. And when we gather data from surveys, we need to set some rules for the respondents. One of the simplest rules that we need to establish is the data type restrictions (e.g. used for entries like date of birth, university name, semester, etc).
Simple Google Form settings like question type and the number of responses limit are a few of many configurations that we can set before distributing a survey to make the next step of the data analysis easier for us. This is a significant step, yet often forgotten by survey creators. As we know, the data preparation process is the longest process in doing data analysis. Thus, we need to find a way to minimize it.
Creative and Consumable Dashboards
Learning to use BI software like Power BI and Tableau for the first time felt like we’ve just discovered fire. For some of us, we might feel over-excited to throw a lot of colorful visualizations in our dashboard. However, the thing that we need to realize is the fact that our dashboard will be used by some users from another department, that might have a lack of technical skills (like for instance, how to read data). Hence, It is an absolute necessity for a dashboard creator to give a story to the dashboards they are making. Two of the critical aspects are creative and consumable:
- Creative: try to think out-of-the-box, explore a lot of different alternatives in creating a visualization, and find meaningful insights to be delivered to the user
- Consumable: instead of just a colorful dashboard, we should add narration and story to our dashboard.
The beautiful thing about making dashboards is to find the right balance between those two 😃
To sum up…
Like what I’ve just mentioned at the beginning of this article, that everyone can work with data and do a lot of data analysis in any situation, even as simple as helping a student organization to grow. However, it’s important for us to understand how to utilize data as a powerful tool to give us meaningful insights. And as a team that has been working for several months, we still have a lot of room for improvement. But I really hope that this article will be a step to demystify data analysis for everyone and encourage others to start doing what we do to improve their organization.
Reach us via email: pusdatin.ppim@gmail.com
Instagram: @ppi_malaysia
