How data mature is your organisation?
Try our free self assessment tool to find out
This generally takes people around 20 minutes to complete and will give you a detailed report with sector benchmarking. If you’re busy you could try our 5 minute taster which only gives a headline report. You can choose to continue to the full assessment at the end of the taster if you wish.
Just quickly, before you start
When completing the assessment, please try to answer questions based on your perception of the overall organisation, rather than you as an individual. There are no right or wrong answers. If you’re from a small organisation with less than six staff, you may want to invite colleagues to complete the assessment as a group. If you’re from a larger organisation, you might want to try the organisational version. The more representative the participants, the more accurate the results will be.
Your responses will not be shared with anyone, though will enable us to monitor how representative of the sector our benchmark is. Please use your work email address otherwise we cannot include your anonymised results in our benchmarking data to benefit others.
Anonymised aggregated data from respondents will be analysed for research purposes to help build understanding about data maturity in the not-for-profit sector. Read our privacy policy.
Data Orchard's data maturity framework
What will my report tell me?
Data maturity is an organisation's journey towards improvement and increased capability in using data. This assessment covers seven key themes: Uses, Data, Analysis, Leadership, Culture, Tools, and Skills. Your overall results will indicate where your organisation is on the five stage data maturity journey: Unaware, Emerging, Learning, Developing or Mastering.
What do we mean by ‘data’?
When we say 'data' we have a broad definition. We include all the types of information your organisation collects, stores, analyses, and uses. It can be recorded in many formats: numbers, text, images, video, maps. For example it might include:
information about the people you serve (i.e. beneficiaries, clients, service users, customers)
which services they receive/or activities they engage with
how you engage with the people you serve and other stakeholders
financial information (costs, income)
details of staff, volunteers, and contractors
outcomes/impact measures
information about population needs/the environment held internally or by external bodies (e.g. health services, government, academics)
monitoring and evaluation
performance indicators.
And the list could go on….
MORE ABOUT THE TOOL
At Data Orchard, we have been researching and testing data maturity in the not-for-profit sector since 2015. We built this tool to help not-for-profits understand how they are doing with data, and to build a clearer picture of our sector's needs.
We are extremely grateful to our funding partners for their grant support towards the project. They are: Digital Impact, an initiative of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (Stanford PACS); Esmée Fairbairn Foundation; and CAST – The Centre for Acceleration of Social Technology.
Find out more about data maturity and the background to our data maturity framework:
Want to know how we got to this point? Read more about the background behind our research into data maturity and how the data maturity framework was developed.