Using data and AI for social good: Insights from Magid, Director of Data & Insights at Catch22
We’re excited to bring you our latest Digital Leads Network member feature, spotlighting Magid El-Amin, Director of Data & Insights at Catch22. In this interview with David Scurr, CAST Programme and Partnerships Lead, Magid shares valuable insights on innovation, collaboration and the transformative potential of technology in the charity sector.
Q: Thanks for joining us for the interview. Let’s dive right in. Can you tell me where does digital show up in your role at Catch22?
A: Digital plays a crucial role in two key areas of our work. Firstly, it enhances our service delivery efficiency. When we win a contract, we immediately start thinking about how to use digital tools to make certain processes easier for our staff. For example, in our colleges, we’ve moved from using Excel spreadsheets or pen and paper to record registrations and absences to using Power Apps on iPads. This makes the process seamless with greater analysis capability.
Secondly, digital drives innovation in our services. We’re constantly thinking about what we can offer in the digital sphere that goes above and beyond our core services. For instance, if we have a service that works with young people and is staffed from 9 to 5, we know people are going to want to be referred outside of those hours. So we’re exploring how we can use digital elements like chatbots or digital assistants to provide some level of service during those out-of-hours slots. While these can’t replace human interaction, they can offer advice, signposting and immediate resources to someone who might want to use our service when staff aren’t available.
Q: How do you see data and digital coming together in your work?
A: I think it’s a false dichotomy to separate these things out into just data, just digital or just tech. We need to think about it as a spectrum. At one end, you have your IT function — your hardware, software, systems, access, licences, security and data protection. At the other end, you have groundbreaking AI. In the middle, you’ve got digital, advanced analytics, data visualisation, data engineering etc.
I’m not a fan of siloing these elements because, while you might not specialise in every area, you’ll generally be exposed to all of them. Without IT, your laptop won’t work properly. Without digital elements, your work will be clunky and inefficient. Without analytics and data engineering, you’ll be making decisions based on outdated or inaccurate information. You need a good blend of everything, which is why we try to work with colleagues across the whole business who specialise in different areas. We convene these subject matter experts under a single banner to solve problems, rather than focusing on individual areas.
Q: You seem to have gained a wealth of experience in the sector in a short space of time. I’m curious to know what was your route into your current role?
A: My journey into this role was quite deliberate. I graduated right into the financial crash (2010), which made the job market incredibly tough. At that time, people at senior levels were being made redundant and taking more junior roles, making it even more challenging for new graduates.
I was very determined to work in the charity sector, so I started volunteering and took a role as a youth worker. When I grew further into the sector, I enjoyed working with data and focusing on understanding how CRMs and data insights work; concentrating on the user side — essentially, translating insights to people in a way that would help them do their jobs better.
This approach took me from being a coordinator to an analyst, then a senior analyst, a strategist, and now a director. I’ve worked in various organisations including The Children’s Society, NSPCC, Comic Relief and now Catch22.
The job now is a mix of technical expertise, strategic problem-solving, people leadership and communication skills. It’s about being able to translate complex concepts to people, use analytics to tackle strategic problems and address critical business issues. Whether it’s increasing our win rate for contracts, addressing staff turnover or managing agency spend, data always has a part to play in finding a way through.
Q: What excites you most about your work?
A: There are two main things that excite me. First, there’s a real kick we get out of being able to deliver a better service today than we would have done yesterday. This means we can see more people or help people to a deeper level. For example, with our colleges, we’re exploring how we can see more high-needs students without a massive change in budget. It’s a very difficult task, but with data analytics and AI, we’re looking at ways to package our courses differently. Can we help people who might want to study remotely or at unorthodox times that don’t necessarily fit the academic year?
The second thing that excites me is making our frontline colleagues’ jobs easier. Fewer clicks, more insight, instantly. When we deliver a Power BI dashboard you can see how quickly colleagues realise what they can now see and understand their impact — that’s fantastic. It generates curiosity and leads to people coming to us with problems they’ve identified, asking for help in solving them. For instance, they might notice a peak in attrition and want to understand what’s going on. We then get to coach people through that problem-solving process, which allows us to see things we otherwise would never have encountered.
Q: Touching on those efficiencies, you’ve been actively sharing some of your AI applications through various forums. Can you share some specific examples of how AI is enhancing your work at Catch22 and helping you achieve your mission?
A: For us, the most exciting thing is being able to deploy predictive analytics really quickly. A few years ago, building a machine learning model, like a random forest algorithm to predict certain outcomes, was quite time consuming. You’d need a specialist who could write efficient code, understand the business context, and also socialise the concept to get people excited about it and actually use the model.
Now, thanks to free open-source tools, it’s much easier to educate yourself, build a model, and deploy it in a testing environment. This is powerful for us because it allows us to understand what aspects of our services lead to positive outcomes, so we can focus on those elements. We can also predict, at design stage, the specific impact a service will have and what levers to adjust to increase that impact. That’s extraordinarily powerful in allowing us to deploy our resources more effectively.
While there’s a lot of hype around Large Language Models and generative AI, I think this kind of machine learning and predictive analytics, which has been around for a long time, is extremely powerful and is much underused in our sector.
Q: You’re part of the Digital Leads Network AI peer group and you’ll have been aware of some of the concerns around risks and apprehension to using AI. What advice do you have for organisations apprehensive about adopting AI?
A: The job is to balance the opportunity and the risk. For anyone who’s apprehensive, it’s important to acknowledge that your apprehension is not without reason. This technology is moving fast, and the current mentality is often “move fast, break things and think about it later.” So the apprehension is valid, but don’t let it stop you from realising the opportunities.
In practical terms, if your charity uses Microsoft Teams or Microsoft 365, you’ll have the ability to onboard Copilot quite quickly. This is an easy way to have a powerful AI assistant in your day-to-day work — drafting emails, putting together slide decks, planning your day, compiling notes. These small tasks can make your time more efficient and get you used to the idea of having an AI assistant.
When you come to using AI within your organisation as a matter of course, go through some sort of governance process. Understand the technical elements — is your data always flowing through and stored in the same cloud servers? Does it leave the UK? Does your data go and train a master model somewhere else? The greater your knowledge, the more secure you’ll feel in its use.
Q: That’s great advice! And so I’m curious to know how you foster innovation in your organisation, while keeping that balance between opportunity and risk?
A: For me, fostering innovation is about constantly bringing new ideas to the table and having a process for prioritising, building and testing. Practically, we take time to find really cool things happening in the market, and bring them to attention. This isn’t just in data insights team meetings, but in broader meetings that include business development, corporate partnerships and Comms.
For example, I might take time to explain how recommendation engines work, like those used by Amazon or Netflix. The goal is to spark curiosity in people and show them things they’re exposed to in their everyday lives but might not understand implicitly.
I’ve also had the opportunity of speaking to our employability coaches who work directly with people seeking education, training or employment. I’ve talked to them about Gen AI and how they can use it in interview scenarios or to upskill themselves about topics like green jobs. This helps dispel their anxiety a little by showing them behind the curtain and demonstrating practical applications in their day-to-day work.
My advice is to forget the conceptual and high-level ideas at first. Get into the practical applications straight away. The more people can think about it, understand it and test it, the more comfortable they’ll feel. This hands-on approach tends to lead to more productive conversations around risks, opportunities and costs later on.
It’s also about finding that hook — the thing that really resonates with the person or team you’re working with — and then getting really practical with a test-and-learn approach. At the same time, it’s important to marry this experimentation with risk mitigation, especially when those risks could create harm or become a blocker for those who want to experiment with new technologies.
Q: Super helpful tips — “showing rather than telling” combined with finding the hook is so important to spark curiosity and interest. How do you see networks like the Digital Leads Network help do that — foster innovation and collaboration in the sector?
A: I think the biggest USP for a group like this is the connection between different people looking to make the most of the same opportunity and experiencing the same challenges. Even at the face-to-face event a few months ago, what was really clear to me is that organisations of varying sizes, with a wide range of revenue, existing in various different areas — be it education, public services or children’s rights — all face very similar issues.
The greater the connection between these different individuals, the greater the propensity for solving these problems. Sharing these issues makes it much easier to move into problem-solving mode, and it creates connections between people that extend beyond the group.
I also think that when it comes to new technologies like AI, early on people tend to be very good at overestimating the risks and underestimating the opportunities. By getting together in a group like this, sharing concerns and balancing out the risks and opportunities, people suddenly feel more comfortable. Yes, we at Catch22 are in a fortunate position to have tested a few things and sometimes failed, but also succeeded. Sharing that with people is important, especially the mistakes, and I think that’s the key thing we want to see more of in a group like this.
Q: Is there anything you’re puzzling over at the moment?
A: One of our main challenges is convincing large funders, like local authorities and central government agencies, to invest in long-term visions where efficiencies and cost savings may only materialise after several years. Many local authorities are in tough financial situations, and having to make tough funding decisions, we want to avoid a race to the bottom in service delivery contracts.
I’m constantly thinking about how we can build a coalition of partners in public service delivery who want to innovate and deliver value, rather than just competing on price. The goal is to find ways to provide services through good, robust methods without sacrificing quality or long-term value. This balance between cost-effectiveness and maintaining high-quality, innovative services is a strategic problem we’re continuously working on.
Another area I’m keen to learn more about is how other organisations have experimented with traditional AI and generative AI. I’m particularly interested in hearing about what’s worked well for them, how they’ve fared with getting talent on board to help with these initiatives and what some of the tangible results have been. For instance, have they been able to increase donations, reduce donor attrition, or increase service delivery in some form? I’m also curious about how their trustees have received these initiatives.
Q: Amazing, thanks Magid. To wrap up our interview, could you share any resources that have inspired you recently?
A: Absolutely. There are two resources I swear by; one is a blog called Towards Data Science on Medium. It’s fantastic, with plenty of technical stuff to satisfy people who want to know the nitty-gritty, as well as more accessible AI-relevant content. It offers lots of insights into how organisations like the New York Times handle their backend data, or how Netflix does data engineering. It’s firmly on the browser Favourites Bar!
The second resource is a weekly newsletter called Data Elixir. It’s absolutely wonderful, covering everything from interesting blogs and scientific articles to self-learning courses, and code cheat sheets. For me, it’s the one-stop shop for what’s happening around data science.
There’s also the Data Viz Society, a global group of data visualisation experts who come up with all sorts of really interesting charts and ways of telling a story in a single image or visualisation. It helps us think how to push ourselves further!
Q: Wow, lots of great blogs to check out, thank you. And finally, how can people connect with you if they’d like to get in touch with you?
There are also a few meetups around Power BI and RStudio that I find valuable. And of course, I’m always at the bigger conferences like the Big Data London conference.
Big thanks to Magid for taking the time to chat with us and for all his contributions to the Digital Leads Network. For our network members, don’t forget you can continue the conversation with Magid through our members hub and our LinkedIn Group. Let’s keep the conversation going and drive positive change in our sector!
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