Urgent call for Data4Good guinea pigs
Whether you prefer to think of yourself as a willing guinea pig, or a serious test pilot, your Data4Good community needs you.
We are delighted to announce that we have begun work with our chosen digital agency, Outlandish, to build an online version of our data maturity assessment tool for the social sector. The work is funded by Stanford University’s Digital Impact programme, the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, and CAST (The Centre for Acceleration of Social Technology).
We have spent over three years developing this tool, which is based on the data maturity framework we developed in partnership with DataKind UK. (Download the framework or the full research report.)
Since its launch, the data maturity framework has been downloaded over 750 times. It has been used by leading not-for-profit organisations such as the International Red Cross, NCVO, and Parkinson’s UK. It has also been used in other sectors like: The Welsh Audit Office, The Greater London Authority, and Scotland’s Rural College.
We’re delighted our tool has been used successfully by such diverse organisations to stimulate discussion and inform strategies and plans, but now we want to turn it into something even more useful. Our online version of the tool will enable organisations to self-assess their data maturity and benchmark themselves against others in the sector. We hope this will help us to reach many more non-profits to help build understanding, motivate improvement, and promote the importance of data for good.
Can you help?
And that’s where we need your help. We are looking for a small number of organisations who can spare a staff member for 1-2 hours to attend one or two of our test user sessions. These will take place at Outlandish’s offices in Finsbury Park, London on either Tues 26 March or Tues 2 April.
Ideally our test users will represent the range of non-profit and social sector organisations who will benefit from the tool once it’s live, and will have a job role that involves data in some way. They also need to be senior enough to answer questions on behalf of the organisation. It doesn’t matter if your organisation has completed a version of the tool in the past, but we’re also keen to speak to organisations who’ve never used the framework.
In return we can pay a fee of £50 per session, plus you will benefit from the warm glow of knowledge that you’ve helped to develop an essential tool which will be available free to the Data4Good community. If you think you can help, please get in touch asap with sian@dataorchard.co.uk.