DataKind UK’s new five-year strategy
By Giselle Cory, Executive Director at DataKind UK
The last five years have seen incredible change in the social sector’s use of data. More and more charities are using data to inform their decision making and increase their impact. Though we don’t have a clear idea of the number of data people in charities, the amount of interest we’ve seen in creating communities for social sector data folk indicates that there’s a healthy and growing workforce dedicated to this area. Forward-thinking leaders have begun to prioritise the foundational, technical graft that enables these transformations. And — crucially — a handful of the most responsive funders are recognising the importance of this, especially in the form of grants for core work. There is a lot of excellent work to be celebrated, especially in the face of the pandemic’s brutal impact on many charities.
For DataKind, an organisation that believes in the power of data science to transform the sector and the lives of the people it serves, this change is brilliant to see. We have strived to catalyse and support data transformation within organisations. Over the last five years, we have grown too — with an increase in our number of projects, and the size of our volunteer community and staff team. The breadth of our work has also changed, expanding to encompass more sector-wide support such as the Data Collective and the Data4Good Festival.
Now, we are looking ahead to ensure that we continue to provide what the sector needs to make full use of responsible data science. This year, we have heard the ideas, requests, and feedback of charities, our volunteer community, our staff team, and others in the sector, and distilled these insights into a new five-year strategy. We’ve come to a few conclusions:
Nothing beats working one-to-one with charities to support their data transformation. Our programmes mean that we work closely with organisations over a long period, and this support has a huge positive impact on their capacity to use data science. But at our small size we quickly hit our ceiling. So we are going to scale our flagship projects — DataDives and DataCorps — in order to support more organisations every year.
Charity leaders need to be supported to make sustainable change. We often speak directly to the ‘data people’ in each organisation, but a sustained culture shift only comes when charity leaders understand how they can best use their data. So we are going to experiment with new programmes that support leaders in particular, like a mentoring programme for those who want to make better use of data but aren’t confident about how to go about that, and a programme to get data experts on trustee boards to bolster the expertise available to the sector.
The people doing data work in charities often lack the support they need to thrive. As with many charity sector roles, data people wear a lot of hats, and can feel isolated and siloed by being the only person in their organisation that ‘does data’. We will continue to develop a peer-support community, the Data Collective, following a successful pilot earlier in the year.
The incentives still aren’t there. The charities that are using data to inform their practice are largely doing so because they know it will transform their impact — but they are not being incentivised to do so with funding. We will work with funders to improve these incentives, so that data-driven practices are supported and rewarded, and charities have a shot at the funding they need to create and sustain responsible data use.
We need to spark the data imagination! Understanding what is possible and what has worked elsewhere is a key catalyst for change, but often these stories and case studies aren’t there to be learnt from. We will provide a platform for charities to share their stories, bringing more examples of responsible data science use to a wider audience in the sector.
The ‘data support landscape’ can be confusing, and there are big gaps. We want to focus on data science — that’s what we’re good at! — but we also know that many organisations have other data needs that are blocking their progress. We will work with others in the sector to create a map of support so that no one gets lost, and will dedicate 20% of our time to fill the ‘data needs gaps’ that are otherwise unmet.
We couldn’t achieve any of these aspirations without our volunteer community. Our volunteers are brilliant, talented and motivated, and at the heart of everything we do! As we develop new programmes, we’ll create new volunteering roles and ensure that we’re supporting community members to do these well. We’ll also work to make sure our volunteer community is diverse and our practices are as inclusive as possible.
The social sector deserves to be able to access the whole toolkit that responsible technology has to offer, to be as effective and impactful as possible. We hope to help the sector to get closer to that vision.
If you’re interested in getting data support, get in touch here.
If you have skills you’d like to contribute, sign up to volunteer here!
If you want to find out more about data science in the charity sector and our work to boost it, sign up to our mailing list.
You can also read more about our five-year strategy here.
