From Reactive to Proactive: Centering Nonprofits in Their Data Storytelling Efforts
Every human service nonprofit starts with a mission to have a positive impact on the lives of the clients and communities it serves. Measuring the extent of their impact is an essential challenge that only grows as they provide more services to more people.
This is why data can be so valuable to community-based nonprofits — data offers signals about what’s working and what can be improved. With an ever-growing array of resources at our fingertips, data has never been easier to collect and analyze. While some larger nonprofits have robust databases that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to maintain, smaller nonprofits can often get by just fine with free and low-cost solutions. If you don’t live in the nonprofit data world, you might be surprised at how much you can do with some Microsoft Forms and Excel spreadsheets.
And yet, so often, human service nonprofits are not actually finding useful insights in their data or leveraging those insights to improve their services. Why not? One reason is that most nonprofits’ data work isn’t centered on their own opportunities and needs. Historically, the drive to collect and use data has come from funders. The funder makes the ask: This is what we need from you. We want to see how things are going, so collect these numbers and fill out this form. Naturally, the organization designs its data processes in response to these requests.
That approach works for one funder or even a handful, but the more grants a community-based nonprofit receives, the more challenging it becomes. Most community-based nonprofits don’t hire data professionals or teams until their funders’ data collection and reporting requirements become too burdensome for the existing program and admin leaders to handle. But by that point, the organization’s piecemeal, funder-centric data processes are established and not easily changed. No nonprofit data professional starts with a blank slate; rather, they inherit what was cobbled together before their time. That infrastructure is typically good at giving funders what they need, but not much else.
At its core, the problem isn’t the infrastructure; it’s the culture. Most human service nonprofit leaders and staff have spent years seeing data as something they collect to meet others’ needs and not their own. Data professionals can live in this rut for years, checking the boxes required to maintain their funding but never challenging the status quo of who their work is really for.
The Data Storytelling Collective (DSC) exists to put the needs of community-based nonprofits at the center of their data work. It is no coincidence that the first focus area within our Nonprofit Data Storytelling Framework is Culture — good data work all starts with and flows from a healthy, learning-focused data culture. In order to help nonprofits use data to see what’s working and what can be improved, nonprofit data storytellers have to flip the script and put their organization’s needs at the center. This doesn’t mean shirking their funder reporting responsibilities; it just means allowing those to be the outworking of what they’ve set up to collect for their own use.
The DSC doesn’t have this all figured out. Improving how a human-service nonprofit collects and uses data is complex, long-term work. But our members know that we’ll make better progress when we work together. By learning from one another and sharing our everyday struggles and victories, we can help our nonprofits collect and use data more proactively to provide better services to the clients and communities we serve.
Do you have comments, questions, or want to get involved? Please fill out our contact form — we look forward to hearing from you.
