Data that Empowers the Community

Guest post by Tom Pollak, Director of National Center for Charitable Statistics at the Urban Institute

I expect the role of the nonprofit sector to increase in coming decades if we are to successfully "bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress," as Martin Luther King put it. In an increasingly global world, where technology will leave more of us under- or unemployed, and where climate change, an aging population, fiscal challenges, and other forces will leave us increasingly vulnerable, we need a trustworthy and effective nonprofit sector that can help build the resilient, caring, and thriving communities in which all citizens can flourish.
 
But this won't happen unless nonprofit organizations do a better job of thinking and acting based on the good of the whole community. This requires both better leadership and better data. I put leadership as the most important ingredient, but the data make a big difference too. We need leadership to get organizations working better together at the community level to coordinate their services and share resources. We need leadership and data to get organizations working together to track and show their community-wide impact and use this collective impact to convince more people to get out from behind their TVs and computer screens – to not only make the occasional donation or volunteer for a day, but to organize their lives around the value of service, whether it's working as a long-term volunteer, organizing family finances so one member of the family can afford to work in a low-paying nonprofit, or tithing five percent of the family's income to support an organization.
 
This is about values and leadership, but it is also about using data to convince a deeply distrustful American public that at least one sliver of American institutions are capable of working together effectively for the good of the community. Feel-good stories and outreach have a role, but people thinking about making significant commitments need to know that they are investing in organizations or networks of organizations that are making a difference.
 
Our Community Platform is intended to help. We combine data and tools into an open platform, preloaded with comprehensive data on nonprofit organizations and community indicators, into a highly customized and locally controlled website that a state or community can use for sharing nonprofit resources, analyzing nonprofit finances, mapping neighborhood assets and needs, knowledge-sharing, tracking program-level outcomes, volunteering, and managing community projects. Our local partners in four states and nine other communities include community foundations, United Ways, universities, local governments, and state nonprofit associations among others. The Platform is intended to be used by everyone from individuals looking to get more involved, to neighborhood associations, to student groups wanting to map a neighborhood, to operating organizations working together to track their outcomes, and to private and public funders investigating where to invest their resources.
 
The result, we hope, will be the empowerment of community and nonprofit leadership from the grassroots to the “grasstops” that we need if we are to successfully tackle our nation's major challenges.