Charity sector data use: Showcasing Street League, Citizens Advice and London’s CHAIN database
By Giselle Cory, organiser of the Data Collective and Executive Director of DataKind UK. This blog is cross-posted from the Data Collective website, a community for people in the social sector who use data.
Last week the Data Collective held a showcase of three examples of data use in the social sector: Street League, Citizens Advice, and London’s CHAIN database hosted by St Mungo’s. The Data Collective is a network of social sector data practitioners. Find out more about each example below, or take a look at live tweets from the event in this Twitter thread.
Street League on making their impact data public
As part of their commitment to honest and transparent social impact reporting, youth employment charity Street League has a publicly-accessible Impact dashboard. Street League understands their impact by looking at a young person’s starting point, where that person gets to after working with them, and if they hold onto those gains over time.
Culture first
Dr Lindsey MacDonald, Managing Director at Street League, gave us some insight into the organisation’s data journey. The first step they took was not really about data, but organisational culture. Street League embedded a culture of accountability and embraced learning and sharing of good practise between their teams. With this learning culture in place, the dashboard was the next step in being held accountable by the public.
Keeping it simple
When Street League decided to go public with their impact data, they kept some key principles in mind, such as keeping it simple. They wanted to make sure that people could understand what their data says, rather than to produce a deluge of data. This links to a second principle: being honest! Often sharing data and being honest are seen as the same thing. But sharing an ever-increasing amount of data — especially if the data isn’t clear and understandable — can create opacity rather than transparency. A third principle is open dialogue. Street League made sure there was a feedback loop in place, so that the dashboard’s users can share their learnings and requests.
Give it time
Lindsey emphasised the need for a positive environment of learning and developing — including wanting to understand failure as well as success — and the need to commit to this change for the long term. It doesn’t happen overnight! She also encouraged everyone wanting to progress on their data journey to start by increasing the visibility of their data internally. From there, sharing it externally will be an added rocket booster for that journey!
Street League want to keep progressing too — their ambitions for the future are to leverage open data sets from elsewhere and make more use of other internal datasets from within Street League — and they have merged their finance and data teams to help with this ambition.
The CHAIN database
The Combined Homelessness and Information Network, or CHAIN, is the UK’s most comprehensive source of information about rough sleeping. Funded by the Mayor of London and managed by St Mungo’s, CHAIN enables information-sharing between organisations that provide support to rough sleepers in London, to help them get the most appropriate support and ensure that efforts are not duplicated. Crucially, the system is not accessible to the police or other enforcement agencies. Insights from the data are shared in CHAIN’s annual reports. The chart above is one such example, showing where rough sleepers tend to be across the London boroughs.
Drivers of success
Ian Canadine, who manages the database, explained that CHAIN is able to work well for many reasons, including having buy-in from relevant organisations such as Local Authorities, and having a demonstrable benefit to support services. Data quality and integrity is always a challenge, and one that CHAIN spends a lot of time working on. Ian also highlighted the fact that trends in the data can be influenced by service resources, work patterns, and recording habits, i.e. what support services do or don’t do has an impact on who and what is, or isn’t, recorded in the data.
Citizens Advice on their data journey
Citizens Advice provides free information and advice across the UK. They have a dedicated data team to make sense of the 25 million visits they get to their website each year. They publish this data publicly for researchers, funders, and other external stakeholders, as well as for the convenience of staff and their network of local Citizens Advice organisations.
Internal data use
Dan Barrett, Head of Data Science at Citizens Advice, talked to us about how they use their internal data. The data is used by both their data science and impact teams, which together have around 30 data and evaluation specialists supporting a variety of teams and people across the wider organisation. They assess not only case data, but channel data(from telephone calls, web chat, and emails), web data, survey data and more.
Their data journey
During the pandemic, they had to shift their advice work online quickly, and this meant they had to bring all of their operational data into one place for the first time. Since then, they’ve been able to develop Data Architecture Principles, Data Modelling Standards, an org-wide data ecosystem, a data glossary, and a Trello board for their backlog of work! Coming next is a Data strategy, including a renewed focus on working with other organisations as well as sharing their (aggregated) data to aid other organisations.
You can learn more about this transformation from members of the team who have written about the experience and their learnings, including these insightful posts by Head of Data Tom MacInnes and by Dan.
Dan recommended the approach of looking at high level trends over time, as it enables you to spot things you might have missed and confirm or debunk hunches you might have. Their Advice trends is one great example of this.
Share your story!
Do you have a data story that deserves to be showcased? The Data Collective are running these events regularly — get in touch!
