Events | Impact Partners | Impact Story
The 2021 Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) by NTEN went virtual this year with nearly 150 live, interactive sessions, thought-provoking and inspiring keynote speakers, and opportunities to connect with the community. In case you weren’t able to attend, we wanted to share a few key takeaways from the conference. Keep reading for insights from five NTC presentations.
ONE: Best Practices for Building a Nonprofit Data Science Team
Many social good organizations recognize the value of data and analytics, but few have experience building out an organization’s data science capacity in a way that supports all of its strategic goals.
Nonprofits looking to integrate data analysis into everyday decision making should apply critical considerations and best practices, such as:
- setting realistic goals and managing expectations
- selecting the right type of team structure
- identify skills and expertise needed based on specific objectives
- how to address common challenges
- distinguish the role of technology vs. people
- key organizational commitments required to ensure success
A few things to keep in mind:
- Iterate and experiment – you may need to try on a few approaches before settling into what works best for your organization
- Start with a clear, self-contained research question or objective, and make sure it is tied to a decision and is actionable
- Building data literacy and change management must happen hand-in-hand, and don’t discount how much time it takes
- Operationalizing data science sets in motion strategic shifts that require leadership buy-in
Speaker Contact Details:
Ben Kirshner, Civis Analytics, bkirshner@civisanalytics.com
Kate McKenney, NRDC, kmckenney@nrdc.org
TWO: Impact Stories: Combining Stories and Data to Better Prove Impact
The services that nonprofits provide are life-changing. Unfortunately, many organizations struggle to capture, interpret and utilize their life-changing data in a meaningful way. We use impact stories to apply data that validates a specific and measurable variable that has been moved by these actions. So, how do we effectively demonstrate impact?
Create your impact story.
An impact story is an authentic melding of data and empathy and can be used within an organization to prove community and participant impact. It’s the who, what, when, where and why. Start by asking yourself these questions:
- Who are you working with?
- Why are we serving this population?
- What are their needs?
- How does what you do improve lives?
Numbers don’t necessarily show or equal impact; be sure to explore and explain what the numbers really mean. Once you have your story, it’s time to leverage it. While there are several ways to use your impact story – grant applications, social media, board + funding conversations – we encourage you to take it one step further.
Start in your community.
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” – Audre Lorde
Until now, the way we’ve done things has been disjointed and siloed, making it difficult to turn the data that you do have into something legible because you’re not necessarily looking at the whole picture.
Explore ways to fit your impact story into the broader story and bring it outside your primary issue. It’s going to help build your partner collaboration so that you have some substance for the broader story. When funders see the whole picture, they can better understand the need for community and collaborative technology efforts.
So, how do we collaborate? Start by asking yourself:
- Can we share our data with other organizations to accelerate change? If not, how can we begin that process?
- How impactful are we compared to others in the same sector? Where are there opportunities to partner?
- Where is there major overlap in services requested in our client base?
The takeaway here is data.
You can’t see impact without data. The more data you have, the more data you can share, and more data means you can tell a better impact story. More collaboration means more impact – but it all starts with data. And a good tech-enabled organization will use data and technology to change lives, not just to prove their impact.
Speaker Contact Details:
Stephanie Fast, Impact Partners, sfast@socialsolutions.com
Jeff Melando, Impact Partners, jmelando@socialsolutions.com
THREE: Talking About Mental Health in a Virtual Workplace
Half of all people are reporting mental health symptoms during the pandemic. Do you know how to discuss this challenging topic in a virtual world? If not, you aren’t alone. Get familiar with these tips to get started today:
Empower Mental Health Conversations
- Use person-first language, avoid labeling
- Ask productive, non-offensive questions
- Avoid making assumptions or giving unsolicited advice
- Emphasize each individual’s choice to disclose or seek support
Support Diverse Choices
- Understand the diverse beliefs people can form about the causes, labels and treatments for instability
- Validate the different choices people make about their mental health
- Listen, acknowledge and respect the choices people have made for themselves
Expand the Conversation
- Learn specific tactics for challenging conversation topics
- Recognize and use trauma-informed practices
- Listen reflectively
- Ask questions in support of an individual’s goals
Speaker Contact Details:
Dan Berstein, MHS, MH Mediate, dan@mhmediate.com
FOUR: Data Sharing: What, Why and How
Across the nonprofit sector, there is growing interest in pooling together data to solve shared problems. The sharing of data with partner organizations, researchers and funders has the potential to allow nonprofits greater insights and evidence that will help them achieve their shared goals.
More and more nonprofit organizations see the value in data sharing, but this is not familiar territory. There is great value in data sharing, but it requires technology and capacity considerations for effective collaboration.
Let’s get down to basics – the what, why and how of data sharing.
WHAT? Data sharing:
Data sharing is when multiple organizations pool their similar data together so that it can be used to solve a collective information deficit for those organizations contributing and the people they serve.
Problems that data sharing solves:
- More data about a topic/area
- More knowledge, insights and learning for all
- Building a shared understanding of an issue
- Collective learning
- Multiple perspectives brought together
WHY? The strategic values:
- A community of thought leaders leveraging their data for good
- Access to a larger pool of giving data allows for improved research, analysis and benchmarking
- Help improve data practices across the social impact sector
- Help nonprofits and platforms use their learning to reach new donors into inspired greater giving worldwide
HOW? The collaboration process:
- Data Collection: secure upload to AWS and admin access to raw data
- Processing: data normalized and aggregated by admin and prepared and structured data available to workspaces
- Analysis: workspace is provisioned for analysis, prepared data assets and analysis tools for analysts to create outputs
- Outputs: create dashboards, data visualizations, reports, sample data and categorized and meta tagged outputs
- Publishing: analysts’ flag for viewers or the public, and then outputs are added to the database(s) and cross-referenced
Speaker Contact Details:
Woodrow Rosenbaum, GivingTuesday
Jesse Bourns, Ajah
FIVE: Digital Maturity: How Will You Know When You Get There?
Almost 30 years into the web, organizations have radically transformed to incorporate a new digital reality. We’ve plunged into new channels (first websites and email, then social, mobile, text, ads, voice, and the beat goes on). We’ve hired digital staff and built departments (once just webmasters, now digital campaigners, content strategists, analysts and other specialists).
But what does reaching digital maturity actually look like? And how will you know when you get there?
Hallmarks of digital maturity:
- Use a governance model to make thoughtful, data-informed decisions
- Understand your audience is and create automated, personalized experiences for them across channels
- Widely utilized the disciplines of measurement, learning and optimization
- Constantly prioritized to put energy into the opportunities with the greatest potential impact
- Build experimentation and risk-taking into pretty much everything
- Involve staff from across the organization and digital content prospecting and approaches
- No longer distinguish between digital and non-digital because digital touches everything
Speaker Contact Details:
Misty McLaughlin, Cause Craft Consulting, misty@causecraftconsulting.com
Shannon Miller, Médecins Sans Frontières USA
Molly Brooksbank, Sierra Club
Tatenda Musapatike, ACRONYM