How Non-Profits Can Crowd-Source Data Skills
Intelligent use and understanding of data are integral to the success of charities and other non-profits. Data isn’t new to the third sector – most, if not all charities use data in some form or another, and the demand continues to grow.
But non-profits have a few troubling obstacles in their way. One is the skills shortage; there frankly aren’t that many data professionals around. The other is funding; non-profits, charities in particular, are usually not well-funded, and so their capacity to find and explore data is limited.
Fortunately, non-profits do have a viable solution to hand: crowd-sourcing. There are a number of social data projects out there that can help non-profits with their data analysis and visualization challenges.
is a social data project where participants visualize a given dataset each week, focusing on best practices to improve data visualizations one chart at a time. The project introduced collaborations with non-profits in 2017.
One collaboration was with the UN SDG Action campaign, who displayed the resulting visualizations at the 2017 UN General Assembly in New York City. created a dashboard created to illustrate results of the MyWorld2030 survey.
Makeover Monday also collaborated with Equal Measures 2030, the Inter-American Development Bank, PATH, Operation Fistula and ACLED to give those organizations access to our participants.
Over 500 visualizations later, the community received praise for their engagement, creativity and skills. Data professionals came together to help non-profits grow their awareness, highlight their need for skilled staff and volunteers and find new approaches for telling their stories through data to a broader global audience.
started Viz for Social Good to support non-profit organizations and to make an impact through data and community.
The way her project works is simple and extremely effective: a non-profit can submit a data visualization project, providing as much information as possible. Members of the Viz for Social Good community are notified and can participate in the project, following the brief given by the non-profit.
All participants submit their work by the deadline and the non-profit can utilize the visualizations and dashboards for their communication channels, such as by embedding them on a website, using them on social media and in blogs.
The community has produced outstanding work over the years and below are two examples of what can be done when you give data to people with excellent story-telling and design skills:
Viz for Social Good has been successful in delivering projects for non-profits and won a silver community award at the Information is Beautiful Awards 2018.
Makeover Monday and Viz for Social Good are two of several social data projects that offer access to a community of data experts, many of whom are more than happy to lend their skills for a greater cause.
So how can you tap into these communities for new ideas and answers to your data questions?
Viz for Social Good has a page on their website for submitting a project. For Makeover Monday, non-profits can contact the organizers via Twitter.
The most successful projects and collaborations have always been those that were well-prepared. For non-profits, this means thinking about the following:
To build awareness through these projects, a communications and social media plan is also important, including details on planned tweets, a list of accounts to tag and hashtags to use.
The clearer you can be in communicating what you want to achieve with a project, the more effective the entire collaboration will become.
Lastly, get involved during the active phase, such as when people post their work on social media, to make sure that participants get recognition for their volunteering and benefit from having their work highlighted.
This also helps you continue the conversation online, increasing the general visibility.
