Data, data, data – it’s everywhere and on everyone’s lips. But how can you use the potential of data in a nonprofit organization? Why collect and analyze data? What is the return on the investment? I’ll show you examples of how, for many years now, data has helped us develop free educational projects for students and teachers at the Katalyst Education Foundation.
From the Editorial Board: We are pleased to introduce newest author, data analysis and visualization expert, Klaudia Stano. Klaudia has prepared an article for you that will help nonprofits better understand and use data in their day-to-day work. In this article, you’ll read about how working with data helps showcase social problems and how the organization’s activities affect them. Enjoy!
Four reasons why it’s worth analyzing (and communicating) data at a nonprofit
Data can help you showcase your achievements and build your organization’s professional image
The stories of those who have benefitted from an organization’s support are a staple in NGO communication strategies—and rightly so. However, it’s worth integrating standard storytelling with data storytelling to vary the message. Data helps to objectify the message, and when packaged in the right context, it will help you stand out in a virtual crowd.
Showcasing your data is also a crucial part of fundraising. Whether you can convincingly present the results of your organization’s work may determine whether you get funding. A data-informed approach builds the image of a trustworthy organization that knows what it’s doing.
Case study: How Pi-stacja supports Polish students
As part of the Pi-stacja project, we create free video lessons in math and natural sciences that align with the national curriculum. We take pride in how we help students and showcase positive comments under each video:
We also do our best to show a broader perspective and keep our community informed:
- “Every fourth student in Poland uses Pi-stacja.”
We know how many users watch our videos, and we compare this value to the number of students in Poland aged 10-19. - “In 2023, our free video lessons had over 13 million views, and students spent nearly 95 years watching Pi-stacja’s channels. That translates into over 41 million PLN in savings on paid tutoring.”
- We monitor tutoring prices and compare them to students’ time spent on our channels.
- “Students all over Poland learn with Pi-stacja.”
- We show a map of Poland marked with the locations of our users:
It’s worth combining these approaches, i.e., interweaving individual stories with aggregated summaries.
Data can help you highlight the social issues that your organization addresses
When communicating an NGO’s work, it’s essential both to showcase your achievements and familiarize the community with the social challenges your organization addresses. This serves to remind our donors, partners, and volunteers why we do what we do.
It’s crucial to have up-to-date information about our sector, which means knowing the answers to the following questions:
- What issues do the people we help face?
- Is the situation of our beneficiaries improving/getting worse?
- Is our support still necessary? If so, is the scope and form of the support still the same?
To keep our knowledge of the situation up-to-date, we look up statistical data and research findings. The information we collect is used for external and internal communication, ensuring the organization can work effectively and adequately address needs (I will write more about this in pt. 3).
Case study: Why is Pi-stacja an indispensable resource for Polish students?
- According to Poland’s Public Opinion Research Center (CBOS), every fourth parent of a schoolable child pays for tutoring or prep courses. Nine years ago, this situation concerned every eighth parent.
- Not every parent can afford to pay for extracurriculars for their children. Families living in the countryside, families with lower incomes or from less educated backgrounds use tutoring 40-50% less often than families who are better off, have a higher education, and live in cities (GUS, Lewiatan/Millward Brown 2016).
- In addition, tutoring prices in Poland have been systematically rising for many years (e-korepetycje.net).
Summing up, thanks to access to Pi-stacja’s free video lessons, all students in Poland (not only those from the most affluent families) can get support in their studies.
Data can help you realize your mission more effectively
How can you increase the positive impact of your foundation or association? Is the way you use your organization’s resources (both financial and human) optimal for carrying out your mission?
Data, in confluence with your knowledge and intuition, can help you answer these questions and find solutions. This will help your organization run more effectively, even with the same limited resources. Therefore, you’ll be able to reach more people in need and address social challenges more adequately (see pt. 2).
Data can verify your assumptions, support your intuition, and, in the long term, help build it up. Optimizing your operation is a continuous loop of implementation, testing, and feedback—the effectiveness of new solutions needs to be continually verified.
Case study: How can the Career Map, with minor tweaks, be more effective in realizing its mission?
The Career Map is a website that shows young people how many different career paths and industries exist in today’s labor market. We want young people to have options when choosing a school, university, or job. As part of the project, we created an interactive City of Professions, among other things, where we “built” 160 buildings/workplaces for almost 800 representatives of different professions.
Was the City of Professions designed optimally, considering our goal of broadening young people’s professional horizons?
What did the data show? In 2020, we checked and discovered that the most visited buildings were the ones closest to the virtual center of the city because that is where users “landed” when opening the site.
As a result, the ten most popular buildings generated as much as 21% of all views (even though they only constitute 6% of all buildings in the city). Buildings located on the outskirts of the city, in turn, rarely had any visitors.
In keeping with our mission, we started looking for a way to expose our young users to more jobs and career paths. So what did we change? We increased the number of points where users can “land” when entering the City of Professions to a dozen or so. This helped us achieve a greater click dispersion.
Today, in 2024, the ten most popular buildings generate 16% of all views (so we recorded a 5 percentage point drop).
Other examples of using data to optimize work on a project:
- What did the data show? Most of the job titles entered into our search engine by our users are in the masculine form (policeman, businessman, cameraman; ed. In Polish, all nouns have one of three genders—masculine, feminine, and neuter, so this issue is more pervasive).
What we changed: To show that every career path is so accessible to both girls and boys, we also use female job titles for every career path (see: above ed. note). - What did the data show? The most frequently searched phrases in the Career Map are psychologist, doctor, programmer, and lawyer.
What we changed: We introduced a fun fact section, which we swap every two weeks, about less popular professions to expose students to more diverse career paths. - What did the data show? Users look for job descriptions and industries we have not yet covered in the Career Map or look for jobs under different names.
What we changed: We updated the career path database and implemented a label system that allows you to find a profession under a name other than the one in the database. - What did the data show? Every year, we see more and more visits to the website from smartphones.
What we changed: When testing changes on the site, we focus equally on laptops and mobile devices. When we started, we mainly focused on laptops and computers.
Access to current data will streamline your work and save time
Getting ready to talk to a potential donor? Filling out a grant application? Or is the deadline for submitting your annual report fast approaching? You need data In each of these situations. If you have it on hand, a sudden need for fresh stats won’t disrupt your work or that of your colleagues.
It’s worth having one place where you collect and monitor your key metrics. At first, a simple worksheet will do. Over time, you’ll see if that is enough or if you need more advanced tools.
Case study: Real-time data monitoring in the Career Map
Two years ago, if someone from the foundation’s team needed current data on the Career Map, they would write to me as an analyst. This would, more often than not, take me away from more urgent tasks.
In 2022, we created a project dashboard that allows every employee access to current and archival data.
Examples of dashboard sections:
1. The number of professions described in the Career Map:
Some data is automatically updated every few minutes, and some is updated manually monthly or quarterly based on sources such as Freshmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Forms. The dashboard then grows with the project, taking the team’s needs into account.
The benefits of using this tool (saving time and energy, convenience) have already outweighed the investment many times over.
Your organization can’t afford to ignore data
Data is vital to every organization, regardless of the sector of operation and size. There’s a good reason why most companies employ at least one analyst: it simply pays off in the long run.
In my opinion, nonprofits can’t allow themselves not to collect, analyze, and communicate data. If we disregard the data, we fall behind. I am, of course, not saying that every NGO should hire a data analyst – that is a luxury unavailable for most organizations. However, it is worth investing in developing analytical skills in one or two team members with a knack for numbers. Free courses like the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate | Coursera are a good place to start.
Beware of data overload
But remember not to overdo it: don’t monitor all possible metrics. This is often the case in the early days of implementing analytics in an organization when everyone is filled with boundless enthusiasm and “the sky’s the limit” attitudes.
Focus on key metrics that are important to your organization and regularly check in with your team to see if they are still relevant indicators. After all, an organization’s mission can be implemented in many ways, and priorities change, which is natural. Data should serve us, not hinder us.
No two organizations are the same, and measuring their effectiveness and social impact is very difficult. Nevertheless, it’s worth testing and looking for metrics that indicate whether the organization is heading in the right direction.