Five local strategic data initiatives creating a competitive advantage

Originally published March 2024

Data projects can feel overwhelming, distracting, time-consuming, complicated, or all of the above.

But a thoughtful initiative that’s aligned to your mission and goals can elevate your organization’s brand awareness, credibility, and fundraising. Not to mention improve the lives of your constituents.

And while you probably know all this, it can still be hard to know exactly what a strategic data initiative looks like. So here are a few examples from your local peers!

⚙️ Innovation: Last year, Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative published the first comprehensive report on Black wealth in Atlanta. While the report was innovative in itself — it established a baseline and framework to understand drivers and barriers to local Black wealth building — the insights and recommendations it unlocked has opened doors to new innovative transformation. In fact, the state has since introduced a resolution to create its first ever Baby Bonds Study Committee to understand the feasibility and impact of such a program in Georgia. AWBI has not only used data to improve the lives of their constituents, but has further positioned themselves as regional and national thought leaders in community wealth building!

💡 Program design: Learn4Life, Metro Atlanta’s regional education partnership, has a programmatic “theory of action” firmly rooted in data. The L4L team analyzes disaggregated school-level data from eight districts across five counties to identify where economically disadvantaged students, students with disabilities, and students of color are outperforming expectations. These insights lead them to schools where they can better understand what policies and programs are driving success. These programs become “bright spots” that L4L and its partners can help scale across the region.

🤰 Advocacy: In a state consistently ranked among the most dangerous to give birth, we need advocates like Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Georgia. To support HMHBCG’s critical 2024 policy agenda, we helped them create a Maternal & Child Health Data Hub. In the hub, you’ll find key indicators at many geographies including House and Senate legislative districts so the most relevant information can provided to policymakers. And if you’ve done any policy work, you know legislatures have among the shortest attention spans, so the hub also includes pre-formatted one-pagers for all 236 districts that you can conveniently print out and hand to your elected official.

💰 Funding: When United Way of Greater Atlanta first created its Child Well-Being Index nearly a decade ago, the goal was to inform its grantmaking while aligning partners around key issues in priority neighborhoods. When the pandemic hit, and other regions were crunching numbers to see how their communities would be impacted, Metro Atlanta already had the Index, and United Way was already making moves. The Index, which we recently revamped, has guided United Way’s investments where they are needed most, informed strategies of dozens of other organizations around the region, and shaped local place-based programs.

🫶 Volunteer recruitment: Georgia CASA connects volunteers to youth experiencing foster care to help them navigate the court system. As with any organization that heavily relies on volunteers, recruitment is a strategic priority. From their program data, they know how many volunteers they have and how many cases the average volunteer can handle. Combine that with DFCS’s data on how many youth experiencing foster care are in each of their 46 affiliates, and figuring out how many volunteers are needed in each region wasn’t difficult math. But they went a step further to visualize the need in each region, including direct links to the sign-up form for each local office. It both helps them prioritize marketing resources where they’re needed most and shows volunteers exactly how big of a gap they’re filling.

In each case above, the organization is solving a problem, advancing their mission, and improving their position among competitors.

Have other examples? Or have ideas for your organization? We want to hear about it!