The American Express NGen Fellows Program was established in 2009 to honor and connect 12 under-40 leaders at IS member organizations. This fellowship is a part of IS’s NGen: moving Nonprofit Leaders from Next to Now program, which is designed to expand and develop the nonprofit talent pool’s leadership skills and practices and to strengthen under-40 nonprofit leader networks. Each cohort designs a collaborative project to move the needle on sector issues. The 2011 American Express NGen Fellows’ project focused on better using data for decision making. On the following pages they share the results of their multi-faceted project.
Leading Through Data
For emerging nonprofit leaders, the ability to keep up with our counterparts in the private and public sectors as they use data for planning, research, communication, development, and evaluation will be crucial to our success. Our project, “Leading through Data”, focused on the use of data as a critical next generation skill for the social sector.
During our fellowship, our cohort gleaned insights on what it means to “Lead through Data.” This overview provides a summary of our project, what we learned, and a list of resources for the NGen community to make data usage a means toward greater impact in our work and organizations.
We shared our initial project ideas with the NGen community and nonprofit leaders at the Independent Sector Annual Conference, Oct, 29-30, 2011. The project’s focus on utilizing data for the greater good generated a lot of energy and resonated with leaders across the sector.
Core Elements
We decided on a multi-pronged approach to accomplish our goals, rather concentrating on a single research report.
- A curated series of blog entries that called upon sector mavens and data-driven leaders to share insights on the opportunities and challenges in using data effectively;
- A partnership with DataKind (formerly Data Without Borders), an emerging organization that brings together data scientists that lend their skills to address challenges facing nonprofits;
- A Data Dive weekend where three Washington, D.C. based nonprofits were paired with volunteer data scientists to explore one challenging data problem and derive a solution in less than 48 hours.
- Highlight the understanding of data as a next generation leadership skill.
- Dispel the myth that only skilled number crunchers can use data.
- Raise awareness of innovative tools and methods for capturing, analyzing and sharing data.
- Present practical tips to help nonprofit leaders of all skill levels increase their ability to use data.
- Showcase organizations effectively utilizing data to achieve more efficient operations and successful outcomes.
- Provide a forum to discuss the benefits and challenges of using data for social change.
Making Data Mean Something (Anything!)
“We've entered an era where data is cheap, but making sense of it is not”, Dana Boyd, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research.
Through this process, we learned that while there are numerous quality data sources available, we often lack the capacity to turn these numbers and charts into something meaningful.
