Who gets to structure, analyse and benefit from data is just another articulation of who has power, status and recognition in society. People and communities deserve to be able to shape and have a say in how information that concerns them is collected, and charities have a hugely important role in reshaping data both data use and data discourse, to make sure everyone is counted and included in a fair and representative way.

Alex Hutchinson from The Data Lab will share what they do to support better use of data in the sector

This session will consider the case for the ONS producing a “third sector satellite account” - helping us get a better handle of the contribution of the sector to GDP.

A look at how we've been using data at Parkinson's UK to help re-design our information and support services. Parkinson's Connect is a service transformation project to design and develop an end-to-end service pathway that meets the information and support needs of the ever-growing number of people with Parkinson’s and their friends, family and carers. In this presentation we will talk through how we have used qualitative and quantitative data as part of a service design approach as we prepare to begin delivering the new service from September 2021. We will look at the successes and difficulties we have had using data in service design and explore our strategy for the future of data in service delivery at Parkinson's UK.

The collection of data about individuals’ identity characteristics (such as gender, race, and social background) is a rapidly evolving area of work. For social change organisations, the design of diversity monitoring questions needs to align with reporting requirements, but also ensure that staff and service users can, as far as possible, describe themselves in ways that reflect how they identify. This session will encourage participants to think critically about the collection of diversity monitoring data, increase their knowledge of the topic, and boost their confidence to engage with diversity monitoring data in their own organisations.

Charity Digital has been on a data journey this past year. Although the journey is still very much ongoing, they’ve matured from an organisation who rarely used data, to one that is now data-driven. They’ll take attendees through the stages of their data journey, and how each stage has helped to inform their data strategy. While they still have more to learn, they have lots to offer in their key takeaways and learnings so far!

Monitoring and Evaluation is critical to the sector and we need to keep learning on doing it better. However, we should also think about using data for other uses. Examples are using machine learning to power a knowledge sharing platform via text messages, and using data to improve decision making on funding. These are two examples that Claire will talk about, form their experiences at WeFarm and St Guy’s and Thomas’ Foundation.

This session will provide an overview of how the Hands Up Scotland Survey (HUSS) and other data sources such as accident data, the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, and traffic data are analysed and combined in GIS to provide detailed insights into where and how to deploy behaviour change interventions. The HUSS data set on children in Scotland's travel-to-school habits has been collected by Sustrans for 12 years and is now an Official Statistic of the Scottish Government.

In this session, Citizens Advice discuss how they built a consolidated dashboard and set up regular data discussions to help their service tackle the COVID crisis internally. They’ll talk about what they learnt from this process, and from their work using social media influencing with their news and comms teams to help their external stakeholders and the government understand the ever-changing concerns of people during the pandemic.

How does the Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF measure its impact? Measuring and demonstrating impact of Data for Good projects can be a challenge. We will talk through how we address this challenge in the Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF. The project is a unique partnership between UNICEF, The Scottish Government and the University of Edinburgh which aims to use responsible innovative data science techniques to improve children’s lives.

Drawing from DataKind UK’s nine years of experience supporting social change organisations to use data science, you’ll hear real-life case studies from charities, local government, and social enterprises across the UK. You’ll gain insight into how organisations like yours can use data science to improve their operations, understand their clients better, evaluate their services, and increase their impact. You’ll also hear about some of the tools and resources that DataKind UK use to help organisations frame their data challenges, scope projects and assess data ethics.

In this session, Sue will present a short overview of the relevant legal and policy landscape on data storage sharing and use, and some tips on where to start with good ethical foundations. They'll also be time for discussion and questions. Sue is a Research Fellow at the Open Data Institute specialising in digital ethics, with a background in property and her research explores how emerging technologies disrupt established regulatory norms.

Working Families directly advise 2,000-3,000 parents each year, via  free phone and email helpline for working parents/carers, most of them in some way disadvantaged by income level, BAME background, profound caring responsibilities, etc.

But… there is a limit to how many people we can help as a charity.

This talk explores why we adapted to a new digital platform, and our digital data journey to this point

This session will look at how to present output data of charitable organisations for fundraising purposes. We’ll showcase a project done with charity Inter Care, carried out with the support of the Royal Statistical Society’s pro bono initiative, Statisticians for Society. 

Christina will talk through the 5 biggest changes that any organisation can make – without spending money - to make better use of their data and develop a data culture.  She’ll focus on ‘big impact-small cost’ initiatives that can help you to develop an organisation where your people use data, not guesswork, to make decisions.

Christina is Director, Data & Analytics at NEST and was previously Director, Data and Insight at the National Trust.

In this session, we'll dive into some of the key services and capabilities available through the Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit and how you can leverage them to amplify the impact of your social good endeavors. We'll see examples of technology solutions where Microsoft Philanthropies is partnering with nonprofit and humanitarian organizations to help address some of the world's most pressing challenges. We'll discuss how to enable easier collaboration across nonprofit organizations and tools to help you innovate with social impact in mind.

Harnessing large-scale data well is becoming more critical to the work and impact of organisations. Understanding Society offers unrivalled data collected across adults, children, and families on a wide range of issues from social cohesion, volunteering, and charitable giving to health, poverty, and work. This session will provide an overview of how to make the most of this resource, including use of data collected during the pandemic. It will explore potential uses through case studies, and drill into the data to profile the extent to which particular disadvantaged groups are represented in the study.

For beginners, the world of data can be overwhelming, yet there is a wealth of information available to help people understand their communities and empower them to contribute to, or challenge, policies and decisions about where they live. Data For Communities is a spreadsheet-free workshop that is light, informal, and fun. It introduces people to what data is, and what it can and can’t do. Originally designed for local counsellors, it’s since been developed and delivered to journalists, charity workers, and community activists. This ‘train the trainer session’ will take you through the workshop, share its methodology, and give you some tools and tips to adapt the workshop for your own purpose.

Creating an organisation that is guided by data is about connecting what you do back to your mission.  Taking lessons from across sectors, this opening keynote will help set the tone for how you cut through the noise and focus on the things that really matter to your organisation. It will help you get clarity on what to prioritise, the journey to take that is right for your organisation and beneficiaries, what good looks like and outcomes you are trying to achieve. Having this clarity can help avoid missteps or spending money on things that don’t add value.

In 2019 Data Orchard launched the world’s first online data maturity assessment for the not-for-profit sector. With over 600 validated users from every size, shape, and type of organisation; the tool’s designers can now start to share what the data tells us about the state of the sector’s data maturity. This session will reflect on: the strengths and weaknesses of the sector in relation to the seven key themes: Uses, Data, Analysis, Leadership, Culture, Tools, and Skills; surprises and curiosities in the findings; how the not-for-profit sector compares with the public and private sector; the impact the tool has had for those organisations that have used it so far; and future development plans.

How can Colab Notebooks help you get started with advanced data analysis? This session provides an introduction to what Colab Notebooks are, and how to import, manipulate, and analyse data, using a 360Giving dataset as an example. Colab Notebooks are a free, interactive programming environment provided by Google, and use the Python programming language. You don’t need to be an expert programmer to join the session, but some experience of Python or other programming languages is needed.

The local, place-based giving movement is growing. London’s Giving works with place-based giving schemes across the Capital, and believe there is something unique about the value they bring to communities. They’ve looked at what data best demonstrates this value: over the past three years, schemes have raised nearly £10m, over £550,000 of in-kind income, and over £1m in volunteer time. But it can be harder to measure their contribution to 'place' beyond financial metrics, particularly the value of the trust and relationships they bring. They reflect on using data and metrics to measure and demonstrate value; talk about what’s worked and the obstacles with using data; and showcase examples from London’s Giving network.

Charities have adapted and responded at pace to the challenges and changes caused by the covid pandemic. This means that leaders have had to take decisions under pressure and with limited information or certainty. Street League is a youth employment charity that changed the way it operated overnight. From the outset of the pandemic they changed its data collection and reporting procedures to ensure accurate and timely information was available to take decisions. This session will describe what they did, what they learned, and how they’re putting this at the heart of the organisation and its business plans going forward.

What is the difference between traditional measures of a charity’s impact and looking at it through an economic lens? When is it useful to do so? Is it right for your organisation? In this session Pro Bono Economics will talk you through their framework for measuring the economic impact of charities, and highlight some of the key things they have learned in 11 years of supporting social sector organisations to do it in practice. They’ll also provide some thoughts on how the approach could evolve in the years ahead.

What is open source and why it is important in the social sector? Mike will demonstrate British Red Cross’s adoption of a suite of open source tools, which analyse and publish data in the public domain under open source licenses. He’ll show the benefits this brought to the charity, including helping to secure grants and receive analytical contributions - and to the broader community, such as improving access to data, insights, and resources. You'll take away pragmatic steps to adopt an open source model in an organisation while addressing common barriers such as personal data and security concerns. Open source tools and dashboards including the Vulnerability Index and Resilience Index will be explored.

What works? The era of secular philanthropy began almost two hundred years ago but we are still not very capable of answering that question. Can we rethink what we do, and how we learn, to find out what works?

Earlier this year, Catalyst funded a pilot to develop a community for people using data in the social sector. As part of the  pilot, there has been a dedicated user research strand. In this talk, the community organisers will explore what they found out, from talking to a broad range of people from across the social sector about their data needs, but also about how they may wish to work with others in the community.

Google Data Studio allows us to connect to data, build a presentation and more importantly share to make sure it gets into the hands of those who need it, when they need it. This session will look at the pros and cons, the good, the bad and the downright tricky elements of using Google Data Studio. It is aimed at those who are using or might want to start using this (free to use) tool, and are curious about getting started. Ian will use the example of Government web traffic (using dummy data) to demonstrate.

Peabody’s Resident Wellbeing Project was set up in May 2020 in response to the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent national lockdown. Peabody identified their most vulnerable residents and developed a plan to provide an immediate response to their needs during lockdown. The project has a series of deliverables which support Peabody residents in need. It began with a few very important pieces of data about each resident, and led to providing services via a well-architected and quickly designed data flow; locally based groups providing assistance with food; employment; advice regarding sources of help including government programmes; and even an app to facilitate a befriending programme.

Charities have lots of options to collect data but with limited budgets they have to make tough choices. How do they navigate this, and make sure their data is being used to answer useful questions? This session will focus on how NPC have classified the different types of data charities might use to measure performance and understand the effect of their work.  We will discuss how these types of data link to an organisation’s theories of change, and how the framework can help any charity think through it’s options systematically.

According to a report by the National Student Clearinghouse, nearly half of all students entering college are at risk of leaving without earning a degree. John Jay College, located in New York City, inquired how existing student data and machine learning techniques could be combined to address challenges surrounding graduation completion rates. John Jay looked to DataKind to help answer these questions and develop a tool to support their efforts to improve graduation rates. Sponsored by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, with additional support from the Robin Hood Foundation, the DataKind team analyzed more than ten years of historical student data, identifying features associated with at risk students. The predictive model and insights were used to design effective interventions to reduce dropout, as well as a novel software application that allowed the John Jay administration to identify students at risk of drop out, so that the students can receive proactive outreach and support from the college. In its first year, the tool analyzed roughly 1,114 advanced credit students to identify students who were most at risk of stop-out or drop-out. Through targeted and strategic interventions, John Jay has already helped more than 800 of those students graduate over one year, or approximately 73%, compared to a projected graduation rate of 54% over two years for similar students without the tool and interventions. In support of this work, John Jay College received $800,000 for emergency grants and extra staff.

When you're faced with an ever-changing landscape, it's vital to have a clear vision of what your organisation needs to do for success. Data can contribute significantly to this – and the key to getting this right is a Data Strategy that gives a shared vision for everyone. It defines both short and long term goals, prioritises what's important to you, and helps demonstrate strong leadership and commitment to data management. Yet many organisations don't have one. Why is that? What's stopping them? It can feel really daunting when you’re not quite sure what it’s all about. In this talk, Effini share the principles of what a Data Strategy is, how it can help you, and small practical steps to take.

Alex Karet of Softwire will ask how Softwire and Moorfields Eye Hospital give medical researchers access to millions of patient scans without compromising patient confidentiality.

They will discuss how they combine these anonymised images with relevant clinical data, explaining their work producing a state-of-the-art research platform. They will highlight how this platform allows researchers to explore the available dataset without granting access to any identifiable patient records. They will mention their work balancing accessibility of the data with the information governance concerns working with personally identifiable health data. They will also explain how this helps produce datasets for HDRUK and the future of health data research in the UK.

Containing billions of person-based records, from the last quarter of a century or more, SAIL Databank is a rich and trusted population data resource based within Swansea University Medical School whose influence stretches globally. SAIL Databank is accredited to the highest international standards and exists to improve lives by providing researchers with secure, linkable and anonymised data that can be accessed and analysed from anywhere in the world – public data, for public good.

Recently voted in DataIQ’s 100 most influential people in data, Professor David Ford will speak about the pioneering work that he others undertook to establish a privacy-protecting repository for de-identified population data that could be unlocked for society’s benefit. Professor Ford’s presentation will cover the vast array of different data types entrusted to SAIL Databank since those early beginnings, including health, housing, education and other administrative data, and underline the strict governance processes that keeps the data secure but also helps to facilitate and support world-changing research.

Emh Group is a large social housing and care organisation based in the East Midlands of England with properties also in Yorkshire, the West Midlands and the South West, with 1,100 employees and circa 20,000 homes and commercial properties.  Diversity is one of their core values. In 2019 they agreed an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy to ensure equality, diversity and inclusion becomes part of the DNA of the business. One of their first steps was to understand the existing data they held on equality, diversity and inclusion, assess its quality and come up with a plan to improve it. They asked Data Orchard to help them with this work.

In this session we will share our process and learning from the data analysis project, and a year on, what happened and what’s changed at emh.  Data themes will include: merging internal datasets, exploring the external data landscape, changing culture and language (and categories) for equality and diversity characteristics, pay gap analysis and data literacy.

This talk will cover the how, why, and what’s next for the recently developed Urban Health Index, from Impact on Urban Health (part of Guy's & St Thomas' Foundation).

Impact on Urban Health partnered with the Social Progress Imperative, founders of the Social Progress Index (SPI), to develop a Lambeth & Southwark specific Urban Health Index. The Index looks beyond economic indicators to understand the other important characteristics of neighbourhoods that shape health and wellbeing.

By layering data relating to different social and environmental indicators, we hope to build a better picture of the circumstances of people living in urban areas and how their environment impacts their health.

The Urban Health Index provides information on 68 neighbourhoods in Lambeth and Southwark and includes the most recent publicly available data. We capture data on 42 indicators relating to basic human needs, foundations of wellbeing and opportunity, viewable as an interactive scorecard for different neighbourhoods.

Hear from Christians Against Poverty (CAP), a national debt counselling charity who have been on some big journeys using internal data to make data-based decisions, improve operational efficiency, and inform their growth strategy. They've also had a good time using this data to get leadership on board, and seen some big changes as a result. They're now exploring designing a management information dashboards and, by the time of the event, they hope to share their initial learning about writing a data strategy. Join Martin Cowles, Senior Project Manager in the Research, Development and Innovation department, to hear about CAP’s data journey!

How does data translate into publicity and journalism? There are always good stories in data, and this session is about how to bring them out. Freelance journalist David Ainsworth will talk both about how you can use data to tell the story of your own charity, and how data can be used to change perceptions of the voluntary sector as a whole.

Change Grow Live talk about their work as the biggest drug and alcohol service provider in England. Using data to make a difference has helped the organisation grow from a tiny volunteer-led group to supporting over 100,000 people every year. Key to this is a data strategy that has transformed how the organisation uses data, having an impact on service users, those on the first line, and leaders. They moved from Excel-style reporting to use of a data visualisation tool which continues to form an essential part of organisation’s response to the challenges of Covid-19.

Whether it was Covid-19 charts, or US election maps, in 2020 the public became more familiar than ever with data in visual form. But sadly, too few in the social sector use this mix of design and statistics effectively. This session will focus on how they should be using data visualisation to aid decision-making and communication, and how to do it well.

Oliver is the Evaluation Manager at Imperial Health Charity, an NHS charity supporting patients and staff at five London hospitals through grants, arts and volunteering.

Teach First is a charity set up to address educational inequality. Teach First has been in operation for 19 years and over that time helped train and develop over 15,000 school teachers and leaders serving disadvantaged communities. In this session they will talk about Teach First’s journey of using data to inform both strategic and operational decision making. They will discuss their current approach including how they have used data in our shift to virtual delivery during the pandemic and future plans. Join Jonathan Tan, Head of Data and Performance and Daria Kuznetsova, Executive Director, to learn about their journey so far - including some of the challenges faced (plenty!) and how they have overcome them.

Josh Cockcroft at Esmée Fairbairn Foundation will talk us through internal data use, including what data they collect and why - and their ambitions for the future. They'll also talk about their work with social investment data, as well as the Foundation's approach to supporting grantees data needs.

Data science is where maths, statistics, and computer science meet. It’s a broad church, but the end game is always the same: to get insight from data. DataKind UK has years of experience supporting social change organisations to use and value data science. This talk will introduce you to the basics of data science and what you might use it for in your organisation, as well as some key first approaches and ways to get started in order to find out more about your clients or beneficiaries, evaluate your services, or improve operational efficiency. For some organisations, data science can be transformative in how services are run, and the impact they have.

To use data, you need to collect data. For London’s Air Ambulance helipad daily operations, that meant moving from equipment and vehicle checklists on paper, to data-driven digital checklists built in Microsoft’s Power Apps. LAA’s move to Microsoft’s dataverse and ‘no-code’ tools is designed not only to save team time, but also to build data on checklist completions and issues – leading to reporting and insights to help patient care. In this workshop, LAA will discuss technical benefits and shortcomings of the Microsoft suite (especially for non-experts), and the sociotechnical issues and human factors involved in integrating the existing processes of specialist teams of clinicians, pilots, and fire crew with digital tools and data innovation.