Prototyping ways of enabling shared civil society and charity insight about poverty
At Data for Action, we’re just starting out on a new project - our first, in fact - with Joseph Rowntree Foundation. We thought we’d sketch out an outline of the project, what we’ll be doing and why, and, crucially, set out the baseline of understanding from which we will be setting out to explore things.
In the context of poverty and its related issues in the UK, the project’s primary purpose is to co-design, test and implement models that will allow for the generation of insight about people interacting with charities around the UK. Charitable organisations collect a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data about the people they support and with whom they work. This data, however, is largely underused due to a variety of reasons, including but not limited to:
Limited resources;
Technical challenges;
Poor data quality and timeliness;
Low levels of data literacy;
Lack of standards and clear governance.
By doing this work and encouraging participation from across the sector, we hope to realise the potential of data collected by charities by creating the space and processes - the potential ‘models’ - for charities to share their data widely and securely with a focus on taking meaningful action. This must recognise and address both the cultural and technical barriers that prevent this from happening. And this is all with a view to supporting mutually-beneficially understanding of poverty and related issues, better service delivery and more proactive grant-making.
We will be working with our partners, David Kane and Data Collective, between now and the end of the year to make this happen. It is being run alongside and informed by a number of other JRF projects that aim to develop infrastructure in this area too.
So, what will we actually be doing?
Using the core Data for Action approach, we will be undertaking a number of prototyping cycles with a variety of stakeholders. Each of these cycles will include:
Question generating workshops to understand what people want to know about social and economic inequalities in the UK from a variety of perspectives, what they will be able to do with a response and how those questions can be collectively prioritised;
Data and insight identification workshops focused on and linked to the questions generated;
Open prototyping workshops to generate multiple ideas for how the questions, data and audiences might be brought together in a variety of formats, as well as the standards and technical infrastructure required to ensure consistency in the ways these data can be shared;
Resourcing workshops with JRF to understand how the prototypes might work in practice and what would be needed to make them happen in a sustainable way;
Barrier and enabler identification throughout to uncover and understand the ways in which infrastructure can unlock the potential for the charity sector to share data better.
Needless to say, we will need energy and input from others across the sector to make this happen in a way that is as representative and inclusive as possible. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing the ways in which you can be involved in shaping this and the resources we have to support that. We are acutely aware of the demands on the sector and are keen to find ways that enable proportionate and mutually-beneficial engagement.
Haven’t we heard all this before?
We recognise that we are by no means the first people to be exploring these kinds of challenges, nor the first to ask for input of this kind. As a starting point for all of this work, it is essential that we build on existing research and practical expertise that is out there so that we focus our time on what is yet to be understood or tried out.
There are a number of key insights and potential ideas for developing that have arisen from a number of sector-specific or cross-sector pieces of work, as well as those from other contexts that could be transferred and adapted. Some tell us about the barriers, opportunities and considerations for bringing organisations together to share data in this way, while others provide examples of what can be achieved when it happens.
Some of the recent examples of work that might help to inform our baseline include:
Data Collective User Research - understanding needs and barriers of those working with data in the UK’s charity sector
Provisional insights from the Charity Digital Skills Survey 2023
Connected By Data’s work with JRF on imagining insight infrastructure
NPC’s work on developing use cases for a civil society ‘satellite account’ and building a shared definition for data work and how it’s supported
Please feel free to let us know of others we should be aware of too.
What can happen when barriers to sharing are overcome? Here are a couple of recent examples of tools that have been enabled through the sharing of data across charities and other data sources:
And this in the pipeline from Open Innovations
We will be collating more resources that will inform our initial scoping and baseline here. And we’ll be writing more very soon about:
the questions we’re trying to answer through this work (and, of course, what the answers might actually mean);
some specific considerations we’ve identified in the baseline resources;
an exploration of what we might be considering when we say models and prototypes - investigating platforms, products and infrastructure.
A key part of our approach will be to adopt a principle of being open by default, in terms of our thinking, process and outputs, including the prototypes as they emerge. The iterative prototyping approach will provide JRF with a clear direction for development, as well as helping to shape a wider narrative around this challenge. Through this work we will explore how JRF’s infrastructure can support future platform adoption and product creation both internally and by partners. Our approach is designed to find the sweet spot of proportionate operational practicality and system-shaping potential.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on any of this, so please get in touch.