November 1, 2016 | Read Time: 4 minutes
The nonprofit organization Repair the World has one goal: to make public service a defining element of American Jewish life. To achieve its mission, Repair works to involve thousands of young adults every year in meaningful service opportunities — and inspires them to go from being one-time participants to regular volunteers.
How does it do that? In a word: data.
Using a series of surveys and evaluations, Repair learned that once people participate in two volunteer opportunities, they’re more likely to continue volunteering regularly. Repair has used that and other findings to inform its operations and strategy, and to accelerate its work to encourage individuals to make an enduring commitment to public service.
Many purpose-driven organizations like Repair the World are committing more brainpower, time, and money to gathering data, and nonprofit and foundation professionals alike are recognizing the importance of that effort.
And yet there is a difference between just having data and using it well. Recent surveys have found that 94 percent of nonprofit professionals felt they were not using data effectively, and that 75 percent of foundation professionals felt that evaluations conducted by and submitted to grant makers did not provide any meaningful insights.
To remedy this, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation (one of Repair the World’s donors) developed the Data Playbook, a new tool to help more organizations harness the power of data to make smarter decisions, gain insights, and accelerate progress.
The playbook is available to all and designed to help users make sense of the data they already have and to build on it. It can tell you what data you need, how to collect it, how to analyze it to meet your needs, how to present it, and how to use it to inform your work and tell your story. Whether you are looking for guidance on how to create a survey at the end of a program, initiate conversations about data at staff meetings, make charts in your reports more compelling, or hire a data expert, this tool has something to offer.
We developed the Data Playbook because we know firsthand that using data is easier said than done. It means changing people’s mindsets as well as modifying an organization’s systems, workflow, and culture. It is a shift that takes time, money, and commitment. And it takes a willingness to pull back the veil and be honest about what is working and what isn’t.
Many nonprofits find this work all the more challenging because they are trying to measure things that aren’t easy to quantify. For example, one of our priorities at the Schusterman Foundation is to create and support efforts that strengthen the Jewish identities and leadership skills of young adults. These are difficult to gauge in the moment and take staff time and money to measure over long periods.
Over the last few years, we have developed a Jewish Leadership Index to help measure changes in Jewish identity and leadership over time. We have invested in surveys to measure the impact of our programs, worked closely with our grantees to develop their data capacity, and worked with others to support further research.
We know the challenges are real, and there is more work to do, but we have learned that the value of working with data — the right data —can accelerate an organization’s ability to achieve its goals. Data illuminates the gaps we could not see before and challenges us to work collaboratively to fill them.
In the purpose-driven sector, our work is critically important for shaping lives and strengthening communities. Now is the time for all of us to commit to using the data at our fingertips to advance the broad range of causes we work on — education, health care, leadership development, social-justice work, and much more.
We hope that the Data Playbook will serve as a resource for organizations and foundations of all sizes, whether you are just getting started or want to refine your approach. And we hope you will share any thoughts, challenges, and successes as you use it.
We are in this together. Let’s get started.
Rella Kaplowitz is program officer for evaluation and learning at the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and the author of the Data Playbook.
