Skip to main content

Big Data for All: Why All Nonprofits Need Big Data

Big Data - the name probably makes you think of huge databases being sifted through by statistics nerds, economists and financial analysts. That's actually a fair image, sort of. The same type of analysis that helps economists and others make sound financial decisions and understand social trends can be of use to activists and nonprofit staff.

Redefining What 'Big Data" Means:

You initially think of databases that contain millions or billions of records, like Census files. At least one observer of big data wants you to think in terms of importance as well as size. Look at it like this: Mining a huge database of people who support causes like yours can yield some fundraising and marketing insights. Or, you can determine up-front what data is critically important for your organization or cause.

Your cause or organization probably has something that's missing, some data that would significantly improve your advocacy, fundraising or social marketing efforts.

Three Ways to Use 'Big' Data

Data can support your work in many ways. Every movement and nonprofit organization wants to be effective and to use its resources (money and labor) efficiently. Collect data yourself or use existing data to answer many important questions:


  • How bad is the problem you want to address?
  • Is this problem markedly more severe in some areas or some populations?
  • How are your programs working, in terms of numbers?


Use those numbers in fundraising materials, in grant proposals, in marketing plans and in social marketing ads. Numbers should also inform strategic planning: Do you need to invest more resources in this district or that one, for example. Make a case for the effectiveness of a program. What statement impresses you more:

Children and their parents love our science programs, which are mostly filled to capacity.
We taught 650 area middle-school students last year, 150 of whom attended more than one class. Both numbers are up more than 50% from when we started our classes in the June of 2012.

Start Today

Big data and data science are complicated topics to be sure. But the benefits of data-driven activism and nonprofit planning are crucially important though, so you can earn big dividends if you spend some time looking at data you have on your organization.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Crowdsource and Experiment Our Way to a Fairer Economy

Economic and social inequality should be treated as design challenges that, like designs in architecture or packaging can be solved by applying some creative thinking. That's hardly a new idea, but the recession and ongoing concerns about economic inequality make crowdsourcing seem like something worth talking about.  Crowdsourcing as an Economic Justice Tool: Most people have an idea of what  crowdsourcing is and how it works - you let a group work on your problem or challenge and see what they produce. Can they produce a better answer (whatever that means) than an expert or a small group of experts? You can't answer that question until you have some real-world examples to draw upon. That's where social experiments and simulations can prove useful. Maybe there should be specific crowdsourcing projects and a place to organize all of them. We could start crowdsourcing campaigns around a range of topics: New ways of using barter to meet peoples' needs Using buying co...
Post a Comment
Read more

Setting Good Social Change Goals: The Problem of Police Brutality

No one in the United States can say they are totally ignorant of the issues surrounding last week's death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. This post is not about the incident, which has been covered in great depth by others. This post is about setting goals to pursue in the wake of Floyd's high-profile death.  What do protestors want, exactly? This is probably unknowable right now. Sure, they call for justice or for an end to police brutality, maybe in those exact words. Each one of those goals has a huge problem. Let's see why. What does justice look like exactly? Will you know when justice has been served? Theoretically, some felony convictions for the involved officers would work. Right? Maybe.  The goal of ending police brutality is far more problematic. How can we ever achieve a state of affairs where no cop ever abuses any suspect? That is what an end to police brutality might look like. Achieving perfection is a bit too amb...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Technique for Generating Fundraising Ideas

I’ll return to the subject of strategic planning for nonprofits later. For now, I want to introduce another technique for generating ideas, for fundraising, planning, program design, advocacy, and other things. The Filament Technique was created by Edward De Bono, guru of creative thinking, and described in Serious Creativity . The technique is pretty easy to understand so I will just jump into demonstrating it with a nonprofit example. We start by defining a creative focus. In this case I want to focus to securing donations. You could also focus on fundraising generally or on another aspect of fundraising. The process is exactly the same. Having decided on the creative focus of “securing donations” I next need to list some of the normal requirements of securing donations. Here is my list: Potential donors Compelling case for donations Printed materials Objectives Note that those requirements are kept pretty broad. That was done on purpose. The list above is meant to be an illustrati...
Post a Comment
Read more