Data for Social Good

Non-Profit Sector Data

Projects

Jane Farmer
Anthony McCosker
Kath Albury
Amir Aryani
Data for Social Good
 Jane Farmer • Anthony McCosker
Kath Albury • Amir Aryani

Data for Social Good

Non-Profit Sector Data Projects
Jane Farmer Anthony McCosker
Social Innovation Research Institute Social Innovation Research Institute
Swinburne University of Technology Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, VIC, Australia Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Kath Albury Amir Aryani

Swinburne University of Technology Social Data Analytics Lab
School of Social Sciences, Media, Film Swinburne University of Technology
& Education Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-981-19-5553-2    ISBN 978-981-19-5554-9 (eBook)

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 Acknowledgements

We pay our respects to the traditional custodians of the lands on which

we work and acknowledge their Elders, past and present.
We would like to acknowledge funders of our research on data for
social good, including the Australian Research Council (ARC) for
Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities, grant no. LE200100074;
Data Co-operative Platform for Social Impact; the ARC Centre of
Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society, grant no.
CE200100005; ARC Discovery Project, grant no. DP200100419;
Victoria State Government; Australian Red Cross; Lord Mayor’s
Charitable Foundation; and City of Greater Bendigo Data Co-op
partners.
We would like to acknowledge the contribution of the Regional
Innovation Data Lab (RIDL) at Griffith University, Queensland,
Australia, and the Visualisation and Decision Analytics (VIDEA) Lab at
the University of Canberra, Australia.

v
 Contents

1 I ntroduction  1
The Non-Profit Sector and Data    4
Making Good Use of Data    7
Starting to Think About Data Capability   13
Navigating Data Harms by Involving Citizens   15
Key Takeaways from This Chapter   20
References  21

2 Case
 Studies of Data Projects 27
Case Study 1: Outcomes of Family Violence Policy—A Public
Sector Collaboration  29
Project Goal  29
Project Description  29
Collaborating Partners  31
How the Project Began   31
Summary of Datasets Used   32
Methods  33
Findings  34
Outcomes and Lessons Learned   36

vii
viii Contents

Case Study 2: Re-using Operational Data with Three Non-

Profits  38
Project Goal  38
Project Description  39
Collaborating Partners  39
How the Project Began   40
Summary of Datasets Used   41
Methods  42
Data Analysis  43
Findings  44
From the Before and After Interviews   46
Outcomes and Lessons Learned   47
Case Study 3: City of Greater Bendigo Data Collaborative   48
Project Goal  48
Project Description  49
Collaborating Partners  49
How the Project Began   50
Summary of Datasets Used   51
Methods  51
Data Analysis  52
Findings  53
From the Before and After Interviews   54
Outcomes and Lessons Learned   57
Summary  58
Key Takeaways from This Chapter   60
References  61

3 Data
 Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 63
Understanding Data Capability   64
A Collaborative Data Action Methodology   67
Finding Your Data Collaborators   74
Responsible Data Governance   76
Data Ethics and Consent   79
Data Sharing for Collective Gain   83
Key Takeaways from This Chapter   84
References  85
 Contents ix

4 Activating
 for a Data-Capable Future 89
Sectoral Benefits of Non-profits with Data Capability   90
Data Capability and Organisational Competence   90
Data Capability and Field-Building   91
Data Capability and Social Justice Activism   92
Three Stages of Non-profits’ Data Capability   93
Data Analytics as Business as Usual   94
Getting Started  94
Moving Beyond a Data Project: Next Steps   98
Innovations to Solve Data Challenges  100
Research Reflections and Next Steps  103
Our Research Reflections  103
What Next in Research?  105
Key Takeaways from This Chapter and Conclusions  107
References 108

Appendix: The Data Innovation Ecosystem and Its Resources113

G
 lossary121

I ndex125
 About the Authors

Kath Albury is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow

(2022–2025) in the Department of Media and Communication at
Swinburne University of Technology. She is an Associate Investigator in
the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated
Decision Making and Society, and a programme leader in the Social
Innovation Research Institute. Kath’s research investigates the intersec-
tions of digital technologies and platforms, digital literacy, data capabili-
ties and sexual health and wellbeing. She is a co-author of Everyday Data
Cultures (2022).
Amir Aryani leads the Social Data Analytics (SoDA) Lab at Swinburne
University of Technology. The lab applies data analytics techniques for
insights into health and social challenges. His expertise is in data model-
ling, information retrieval techniques and real-time data analysis. Amir
has partnered on projects with the British Library, ORCID (US),
Netherlands Data Archiving and Network Analysis (DANS) and German
Institution for the Social Sciences in Germany (GESIS). His funding
sources include the Australian Research Council, the Australian National
Health and Medical Research Council, and the US National Institutes of
Health. He has published in journals including Nature Scientific Data
and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications.

xi
xii About the Authors

Jane Farmer is Director of the Social Innovation Research Institute at

Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Her back-
ground is as a researcher in rural health service and workforce innovation,
community engagement and social enterprise. She has a keen interest in
academic-practice research partnerships, innovative research methods,
transdisciplinary studies and translating research into practice. Her other
books include Social Enterprise, Health and Wellbeing (2021), Remote and
Rural Dementia Care (2020) and Community Co-production (2012).
Anthony McCosker is Deputy Director of the Social Innovation
Research Institute and is a Chief Investigator and Swinburne Lead for the
Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated
Decision Making and Society. His research addresses digital inclusion,
participation and inequality and explores the impact of new communica-
tion technologies, particularly in relation to health and wellbeing and
social inclusion. Current research addresses the social issues related to
automation and machine vision technologies and media and the need for
community-led approaches to data and analytics. He is author or co-
author of numerous articles and books, including Everyday Data Cultures
(2020), Automating Vision: The Social Impact of the New Camera
Consciousness (2020) and Negotiating Digital Citizenship (2016).
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Taxonomy of data that non-profits might use 10

Fig. 2.1 Topic modelling analysis of Twitter topics related to family
violence 2014–2018. Note: Ribbon graph adapted from data
in “Community responses to family violence: Charting policy
outcomes using novel data sources, text mining and topic
modelling”. by A. McCosker, J. Farmer, and A. Soltani Panah,
2020, Swinburne University of Technology, p. 24, https://apo.
org.au/sites/default/files/resource-­files/2020-­03/apo-­
nid278041.pdf. (Copyright 2020 by Swinburne University of
Technology. Adapted with permission) 36
Fig. 2.2 Timeline and peaks of Twitter activity addressing family
violence by year (2015 and 2016 represented). Note: Twitter
timeline analysis graph adapted from data in “Community
responses to family violence: Charting policy outcomes using
novel data sources, text mining and topic modelling”. by
A. McCosker, J. Farmer, and A. Soltani Panah, 2020,
Swinburne University of Technology, p. 29, https://apo.org.au/
sites/default/files/resource-­files/2020-­03/apo-­nid278041.pdf.
(Copyright 2020 by Swinburne University of Technology.
Adapted with permission) 37
Fig. 2.3 Geospatial visualisation of three Good Cycles’ employee
journeys45

xiii
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 2.4 City of Greater Bendigo Community resilience dashboard

layers by suburb 54
Fig. 3.1 Process of collaborative data action for non-profits’ data projects 69
Fig. A.1 Initiatives and goals of the non-profits’ data innovation
ecosystem114
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 Summary data projects case comparison 30

Table 2.2 Data sources for public discussion of family violence 32
Table 2.3 Datasets used in the three non-profits’ analyses 41
Table 2.4 Datasets for community resilience data collaborative 51
Table 3.1 Steps in the process of collaborative data action for non-
profits’ data projects 71
Table A.1 Tools and guides from existing initiatives 119

xv
 1
Introduction

In February 2020, just pre-COVID, a group of managers from community

organisations met with us researchers about data for social good. “We
want to collaborate with data,” said one CEO. “We want to find the big
community challenges, work together to fix them and monitor the change
we make over ten years.” The managers created a small, pooled fund and,
through the 2020–2021 COVID lockdowns, used Zoom to workshop.
Together we identified organisations’ datasets, probed their strengths and
weaknesses, and found ways to share and visualise data. There were early
frustrations about what data was available, its ‘granularity’ and whether
new insights about the community could be found, but about half-way
through the project, there was a tipping point, and something changed.
While still focused on discovery from visualisations comparing their data
by suburb, the group started to talk about other benefits. Through drawing
in staff from across their organisations, they saw how the work of depart-
ments could be integrated by using data, and they developed new confi-
dence in using analytics techniques. Together, the organisations developed
an understanding of each other’s missions and services, while developing
new relationships, trust and awareness of the possibilities of collaborating
to address community needs. Managers completed the pilot having code-
signed an interactive Community Resilience Dashboard, which enabled

© The Author(s) 2023 1

J. Farmer et al., Data for Social Good, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5554-9_1
2 J. Farmer et al.

them to visualise their own organisations’ data and open public data to
reveal new landscapes about community financial wellbeing and social
determinants of health. They agreed they also had so much more: a col-
lective data-capable partnership, internally and across organisations, with
new potential to achieve community social justice driven by data.
We use this story to signify how right now is a special—indeed criti-
cal—time for non-profit organisations and communities to build their
capability to work with data. Certainly, in high-income countries, there
is pressure on non-profits to operate like commercial businesses—priori-
tising efficiency and using data about their outputs and impacts to com-
pete for funding. However, beyond the immediate operational horizon,
non-profits can use data analytics techniques to drive community social
justice and potentially impact on the institutional capability of the whole
social welfare sector. Non-profits generate a lot of data but innovating
with technology is not a traditional competence, and it demands infra-
structure investment and specialist workforce. Given their meagre access
to funding, this book examines how non-profits of different types and
sizes can use data for social good and find a path to data capability. The
aim is to inspire and give practical examples of how non-profits can make
data useful. While there is an emerging range of novel data for social
good cases around the world, the case studies featured in this book exem-
plify our research and developing thinking in experimental data projects
with diverse non-profits that harnessed various types of data. We outline
a way to gain data capability through collaborating internally across
departments and with other external non-profits and skilled data analyt-
ics partners. We term this way of working collaborative data action.
By ‘data for social good’, we mean using contemporary data analytics
techniques to fulfil a social mission or to address a social challenge. Data
analytics is understood as the process of examining data to find patterns
and insights that can aid decision-making and offer courses of action
(Picciano, 2012). We define non-profits as all those organisations and
community groups operating to pursue a social mission and that do not
operate to make a profit. Individual non-profit organisations are thought
of here as each pursuing their defined social mission, but also contribut-
ing to a collective social mission of achieving a more equitable and just
society. While non-profits are often using data to track their operations
 1 Introduction 3

and aid reporting, we emphasise the data that non-profits could use to
further their work and goals. This includes mainly:

a. internal data generated routinely from non-profits’ own operations or

new data they might collect (e.g., to inform evaluation). Such data
could be used, or re-used, for insights by individual non-profits or in
data sharing collaboratives with other organisations and
b. external open data generated through government agencies or made
available by other organisations.

We take a pragmatic stance here as we write at a specific point in time

and from our home country context (Australia), which we acknowledge
is a high-income country with neoliberal ideology influencing social pol-
icy. Non-profit data analytics is a fast-moving field where practices and
legislation will change. Other countries and regions have their own
nuances. Globally, the non-profit sector is on a journey with data collec-
tion and computational data analytics. This is influenced by policy that
drives competition and demand for accountability and measurement, as
well as a desire to use sophisticated techniques for social good. This jour-
ney will continue into the future.
This moment feels like a critical juncture for non-profits and data ana-
lytics. Current strategies and decisions taken within the sector will sig-
nificantly influence both the nature of non-profit data analytics and the
philosophy underpinning it, but perhaps most crucially, it will influence
who has the capability to work with data and to what ends—towards
what understanding of social benefit. We believe that non-profits need to
have data capability to shape the future of the sector and affect the differ-
ence non-profits can make in the world. The sector can be knowledge-
able, confident and advocate for suitable data practices, or—lacking
capability—be forced to passively accept data practices determined by
other powerful actors like government and ‘Big Tech’.
This book is meant for non-profit leaders, managers, practitioners and
board members who want to see what can be done with data and discover
how organisations like theirs can become capable with data. It is also for
researchers, as we show how partnering with non-profits can help us to
4 J. Farmer et al.

contribute to social justice and to knowledge about data for social good.
The book is deliberately targeted at the practice and researcher nexus.
This first chapter sets the scene by introducing concepts, challenges
and our rationale for why non-profits should engage with data analytics.
It is by no means comprehensive in its understanding of international
data initiatives in the non-profit sector, especially not in relation to data
law and guidance in different country contexts. For that, we recommend
seeking out local expertise, as that area is subject to variation by country
or region, and subject to change as practice is only forming.

The Non-Profit Sector and Data

The non-profit sector comprises organisations with different legal and
operational structures, including charities, philanthropic foundations,
voluntary and community organisations, community groups, social
enterprises and co-operatives (Salamon & Sokolowski, 2018). Some non-­
profits generate profit but re-invest it for social purpose. The sector has
different names internationally, including the charitable and non-profit
sector (Canada); third sector, social economy, voluntary sector (UK);
third and social economy (Europe); not-for-profit sector, community sec-
tor (Australia and New Zealand); and charitable, voluntary and philan-
thropic organisations, civil society (US) (Lalande, 2018; Productivity
Commission, 2010; Salamon & Sokolowski, 2018). Non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) are non-profits that tend to work in other country
contexts (Vaughan & Arsneault, 2013).
While non-profits generally operate to address social purposes not
suitably addressed by government or private organisations (Vaughan &
Arsneault, 2013), the social welfare role of non-profits can vary even
within countries. Indigenous cultures including the Maori of Aotearoa
(New Zealand), for example, have different understandings of social and
community life that influence what is considered acceptable work for
community organisations. Western notions of volunteering, separation
of family and community, and who should provide community services
should not be regarded as automatically aligned with Indigenous Peoples’
cultural understandings (Tennant et al., 2006).
 1 Introduction 5

In high-income countries, non-profits are significant providers of com-

munity services, including health, mental health, social care, education,
environmental protection and disaster relief programmes. They contrib-
ute significantly to national economies; for example, employing around
13% of Europe’s workforce (Salamon & Sokolowski, 2018). Charities
alone employ one in ten workers in Australia (Social Ventures Australia
and Centre for Social Impact, 2021). Beyond service provision, non-­
profits contribute to generating a sense of community, “giving expression
to a host of interests and values—whether religious, ethnic, social, cul-
tural, racial, professional or gender-related” (Salamon & Sokolowski,
2018, p. 56) and, importantly, act as social policy advocates (Salamon,
2014). As such, non-profits are key actors in the policy community. They
influence what are recognised as societal challenges, provide evidence
about fruitful solutions and influence how the work of their sector is
done (Vaughan & Arsneault, 2013). Government is a major funder for
non-profits in high-income countries via contracts to provide welfare ser-
vices (Salamon & Sokolowski, 2018). This increasingly leads to govern-
ments dictating the terms of engagement. Consequently, it is imperative
that the non-profit sector is capable in contemporary organisational prac-
tices and innovations so it can influence social policy through data-­
supported knowledge and ideas.
In countries where policy is imbued with neoliberal ideology, includ-
ing the UK, Australia and New Zealand, increased provision of public
welfare services by non-profits started in the 1980s–1990s (Tennant
et al., 2006). During this time, many traditional voluntary organisations
became non-profit businesses. Additionally, the trend of non-profits sup-
plying welfare services accelerated following the 2008 Global Financial
Crisis. The marketisation of the non-profit sector led to competition for
funding between organisations, forcing increasing corporatisation. Some
now refer to a not-for-profit industrial complex (Incite! Women of Color
Against Violence, 2017), with concerns non-profits are forced to subordi-
nate their social mission to respond to funder-determined priorities in
order to survive.
Accountability and reporting demands of government and philan-
thropic funders mean non-profits have had to collect increasing quanti-
ties of data. Funders influence or define the data to be collected and may
6 J. Farmer et al.

even supply data collection systems. This scenario can stifle non-profits’
internal strategies about working with data and funnel their work towards
reporting rather than using data to drive social change. To date, the sector
is accused of over-emphasising easy-to-collect output data (e.g., about
number of services delivered) rather than data about outcomes, impacts
and the processes underpinning them (Lalande & Cave, 2017). Over
time, as non-profits look for new ways to gain competitive advantage,
interest in innovative data use has grown. Some larger non-profits invest
in data professionals, while others contract with specialist consultants.
The danger with outsourcing data-related work is that organisational
data and analytics become viewed as ‘too hard’ and internal know-how
diminishes. We propose non-profits need to have data capability so they
can appropriately drive their organisations’ data strategy for impact.
More widely, collectively developing data capability at a sector level
enables non-profits to influence government and funder priorities and
investments around social challenges and data practices, informed by
grassroots experiences. Here, we understand non-profit data capability as
a holistic concept that involves interconnected combinations of resources.
Data capability is hard to pin down to a checklist or benchmarking tool.
It involves having the staff skills and roles, technologies, data manage-
ment practices and processes that are appropriate for each non-profit in
relation to its context of practice and enables effective use of data within
that context. Thus, data capability for a non-profit is likely to evolve,
potentially in response to changing organisation priorities, learning from
trying out techniques and datasets, and in response to emergent data
practices and norms of the non-profit field. Non-profit data capability
has foundations in responsible data governance. We suggest it can be
built through collaborating, experimenting and discovering with data.
We extend our discussion about non-profit data capability and how to
achieve it in Chap. 3.
Unfortunately, as related to business operations rather than direct ser-
vice provision, data and information management tends to be under-
funded in non-profits (Social Ventures Australia and Centre for Social
Impact, 2021; Tripp et al., 2020). Ongoing lack of investment and exper-
tise in social data analytics leads to problems with adopting innovation,
resulting in a phenomenon termed the non-profit starvation cycle (Gregory
 1 Introduction 7

& Howard, 2009). This is where ongoing focus on funding service deliv-
ery leaves organisations simultaneously under-invested in management
and infrastructure, but also in staff skilled to understand what is required.
Organisations are thus vulnerable to environmental shocks, as seen in
reactions to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A survey of Australian
charities’ capability to deal with the pandemic found only 46% used
cloud-based systems and only a third had systems and software for work-
ing at home. Deficits were mainly attributed to underfunding (Social
Ventures Australia and Centre for Social Impact, 2021). A survey and
report by Australian technology non-profit Infoxchange shows that the
sector has not yet prepared for advanced data analytics or for automated
futures, although investment in information technology and digital infra-
structure and systems is improving and the skilled workforce is expand-
ing (Infoxchange, 2020).
Collaboration between non-profits would enable cost-sharing for
infrastructure and skilled workforce, but competition in the sector is a
barrier. This has led to suggestions that government should incentivise or
facilitate collective working (Social Ventures Australia and Centre for
Social Impact, 2021). Some successful collaborative models exist; for
example, Collective Impact initiatives, where community organisations
work together to identify, address and monitor change about a social
challenge. LeChasseur (2016), for example, describes a Collective Impact
initiative to improve lives of low-income mothers and their babies. In
Collective Impact, collaborating with data facilitates measurement of
community-level social change as well as helping to assess the contribu-
tion of individual organisations. Some non-profits are involved in initia-
tives funded by Social Impact Bonds, where private investment can be
gained to fund projects to improve social outcomes, with outcome data
required in order to access premiums (Arena et al., 2016; Sainty, 2019).

Making Good Use of Data

The main goal of non-profits using data analytics is to inform organisa-
tional learning so adaptations can be made to achieve better outcomes. A
range of reasons for applying analytics techniques to data to advance
8 J. Farmer et al.

social missions are outlined by Verhulst and Young (2017), including for
situational awareness and impact evaluation. Once attracted by the pros-
pect of generating such analyses, the issue for non-profits might turn to
how to adapt existing datasets, departments and staff into a system capa-
ble of generating insights from data.
Data analytics for non-profits is not solely predicated on having access
to technology and applying computational techniques. Rather, it builds
on having a foundation of knowledge about using data in research and
evaluation. In this way, as the science of examining data, data analytics
involves considering the characteristics of data you have or can access; its
provenance and how it was collected; its availability for different uses and
who can access it in unprocessed or analysed versions; understanding the
ethical concerns, the consent given and obtained when data was created;
the quality and what is missing in the data; and who data refers to or was
collected from, to understand any in-built biases and data’s inclusivity.
However, as well as drawing on traditional research and evaluation
knowledge, data analytics also requires evolving thinking and skills as
new forms of data and analytical techniques become available and new
ethical principles and practices are developed in response (O’Neil &
Schutt, 2013). Ultimately, good use of data includes careful attention to
how it is generated, the widening range of data types that can be anal-
ysed, and the impact this may have on people’s privacy and other rights
(see Chap. 3).
Exemplifying how using new types of data requires ‘old’ and ‘new’
thinking, we used a dataset of anonymised discussions on a national
online peer support forum to evaluate services for rural mental health
(Farmer et al., 2020; Kamstra et al., in press). Analysis was applied to
identify themes in a large qualitative dataset of posts. Moving beyond
traditional approaches to service evaluation, using the forum discussions
as a rich qualitative dataset meant first agreeing on a rationale for the
analysis conducted, and recognising the complexities inherent in the
dataset as a sample. For instance, we had to address the potential for bias
given that some people were over-represented in the data (i.e., posting far
more often than others). With the focus on more isolated rural service
users, we removed posts made by people living in large rural towns with
hospitals to ensure only more isolated residents’ experiences were
 1 Introduction 9

included. The data allowed us to access the geospatial locations of those

using the online service, but when mapping quantities and themes of
posts geospatially, we had to consider how to visualise the data at suffi-
cient spatial scale and abstraction to remove any potential for identifica-
tion. Thus, while computational techniques now allow analysis of much
larger datasets, and new sources extend potential for social value extrac-
tion from data, many of the same basic research skills are required to
intelligently conduct and interpret data analyses. Making good use of
data involves navigating new possibilities, while translating traditional
research skills to respond to new challenges.
Before progressing further, we now summarise the main types of exter-
nal data sources and types of internal data content that we think non-­
profits might work with. Figure 1.1 illustrates characteristics of data we
have used in our projects. It is not intended to be comprehensive of all
data sources and content that could be used (for additional ideas, consult
other relevant taxonomies, e.g., Susha et al., 2017).
We divide the data that non-profits might use into two categories:
internal data content (i.e., this indicates the broad types of dataset content
generated by non-profits through their work) and external data sources
where data with a range of characteristics may be accessed. In Fig. 1.1, we
suggest non-profits’ internal data content can be divided into two types:
operational data, where data is generated for and through an existing busi-
ness purpose, including data about staffing, clients, services and funds;
and what we term outcome data, referring to data collected specifically for
assessing processes, outcomes or impacts of programmes. For the out-
come data, what to collect is likely to be informed by a theory of change
or programme logic showing links between non-profits’ programmes,
how they are delivered, what they achieve and the ultimate fulfilment of
social mission. Typically, outcomes data might be collected through sur-
veys at intervals following provision of programmes. External data sources
include all data that can be accessed external to the organisation and
used, including open data generated by government statistical agencies
and data made into open data by other organisations. An example we
have used is the Infoxchange AskIzzy Open Data Platform (https://
opendara.askizzy.org.au/), which provides anonymised geospatial
location-­based data from searches for community services across Australia.
10 J. Farmer et al.

Fig. 1.1 Taxonomy of data that non-profits might use

External data also includes government and other organisations’ data that
can be made available under certain conditions and for particular pur-
poses. Such data may be accessible subject to risk assessment or research
protocol (e.g., sensitive government-collected health or crime data). Our
understanding of ‘other organisations’ data extends to data from other
non-profits, private sector organisations, academia and community
groups. External data could include internal (private) datasets where data
is only available to be shared within a limited collaborative group. This
data will be available to the group under specific conditions through data
sharing agreements as part of data sharing initiatives.
 1 Introduction 11

Data may be quantitative, for example, amount of time spent with

clients, numbers of episodes of types of services delivered, distances trav-
elled to deliver services and financial information; or qualitative, for
example, discursive content of notes relating to clients, complaints and
feedback, online forum post data. To be meaningful and relevant, analy-
sis should also harness data that is temporal, for example, data capturing
client needs and transactions on a daily or weekly basis over time and
other forms of monitoring to enable longitudinal and even ‘real time’
analysis; and data that is locational, for example, giving a geospatial loca-
tion of where services were provided or locations of clients and staff
(Loukissas, 2019).
Having summarised types of data that a non-profit might use, a fur-
ther issue is how they might think about sources of internal data for use
in analytics. Through our work, we observe two approaches to sourcing
internal data that we term here the new data and re-use data perspectives.
The new data perspective tends to align with growth of the outcomes mea-
surement movement (Lalande & Cave, 2017; Social Ventures Australia,
2021), where non-profits want to substantiate their social impact. This is
generally handled by collecting new data about outcomes, impacts and
processes. Where organisations initially tended to generate data through
bespoke programme evaluations, more recently there is a trend to collect
generic outcomes data using frameworks and data models. Using stan-
dard tools means non-profits can save effort in generating their own indi-
cators and measures, plus a standard framework allows comparison and
benchmarking across different organisations. Theoretically, funders will
be able to discover which non-profits most successfully address a social
challenge such as social inclusion, employment or crime prevention.
Examples of these are generated by governments (e.g., the New South
Wales Government Human Services Outcomes Framework, see https://
www.facs.nsw.gov.au/resources/human-­services-­outcomes-­framework)
and businesses or social enterprises (e.g., Australian Social Values Bank).
Researchers have also developed frameworks, for example, the Community
Services Outcomes Tree (Wilson et al., 2021) was designed to provide “a
comprehensive outcomes framework to assist services to name and then
measure their outcomes…[and]… a set of data collection questions so
services can ask questions of service users and collect data” (p. 1).
12 J. Farmer et al.

While such frameworks might assist cash-strapped non-profits, they

have potential downsides. They imply collecting yet more data and are
potentially inflexible to the nuanced interests and missions of individual
non-profits. Adhering to them could drive isomorphism where pro-
grammes tend to become increasingly alike as driven by addressing a
standard set of performance measures. This could hinder innovation and
lead to neglecting nuanced needs of different clients and consumers. Piff
(2021) highlights that non-profits could waste valuable time trying to
find the perfect framework and re-orienting their data collection to meet
its new requirements.
Advocacy for the data re-use perspective comes from policy institutes,
researchers and others that are interested in combining digital social
innovation with growing community and civil society data capability
(Dawson McGuinness & Schank, 2021). Analysing re-used data is some-
thing of a frontier space where data scientists may partner with social
scientists, lawyers, community practitioners and citizens to formulate
practices that are ethical and obtain added social value from data already
collected (Williams, 2020). New rules, standards, models and tools are
often emergent from practical data analytics ‘discovery’ projects and col-
laborations (van Zoonen, 2020). An example of generating novel trans-
ferable tools comes from our projects with non-profits (see Chap. 2)
where data protocols and data-sharing agreements were formulated
through iterative discussions with data scientists, practitioners at non-­
profits and lawyers, where necessary.
Ultimately, of course, data must have been collected in order for it to
be re-used and so the new data perspective also could generate data with
potential for added value from re-use. Sometimes there may be a need for
new data, but given a lot of data is already collected and exists, we advo-
cate for optimising data re-use (where ethical and feasible) and minimis-
ing collection of new data.
As mentioned above, non-profits might work with others (non-profits
and other entities) and share or pool data for richer insights and to drive
collective working. Sharing data in multi-organisation collaborations is
notoriously challenging (Verhulst, 2021). Understanding the extent to
which data can be re-used and for what purposes, including sharing
across collaborations, involves knowing why and how data was collected
 1 Introduction 13

originally—and crucially—the details of consent obtained from those

contributing to data generation (Verhulst, 2021). In the case of non-­
profits with their propensity to collect personal data, it often involves
knowing about the nature of consent from clients, citizens and staff.
Issues around consent for re-using and sharing data are explored in
Chap. 3.

Starting to Think About Data Capability

Moving non-profit data analytics out of an environment of research proj-
ects and experimental initiatives and into business as usual requires com-
fort with using data and understanding the roles of data across the
organisation and beyond. As noted above, data capability can be under-
stood as a holistic concept, and we explore this in more detail in Chap. 3.
Building data capability is not just about buying software or employing
data professionals. Rather, it involves deepening knowledge and expertise
in connecting the goals and work of a non-profit—their mission—with
resources enabling appropriate use of data to meet the goals. This includes
proficiency about what, where, why and how data is significant and why
and how to use different data analysis techniques (Tripp et al., 2020).
It takes effort and commitment to grow organisational data capability,
and there is a temptation to turn to commercial platforms and tools, like
Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, for data management and
analysis. The challenge with implementing such tools without an organ-
isation having done the groundwork to gain data capability is that they
apply advanced analysis techniques without transparency. An organisa-
tion that invests internal know-how into identifying and implementing
tools and practices that match its needs will understand potential for bias
and other data harms. While we do not explore use of artificial intelli-
gence (AI) in this book, it is coming and indeed already present in some
non-profit operations and social service work. Non-profits that build
their data capability will be resourced with knowledge to understand this
application of data and to advocate and advise on ethical and wise use of
advanced techniques.
14 J. Farmer et al.

In the context of non-profits’ data work, we favour using the term data
capability. Data literacy and data maturity are other terms applied to try
to capture the idea of being ‘ready’ for using data. The need for citizen
‘big data literacy’ is widely discussed (e.g., Grzymek & Puntschuh, 2019;
Müller-Peters, 2020) in the context of ‘data citizenship’ (Carmi et al.,
2020) as a response to expanded datafication and algorithmic decision
making. Sander (2020), for example, suggests this “goes beyond the skills
of… changing one’s social media settings, and rather consti-
tutes …[being]… able to critically reflect upon big data collection prac-
tices, data uses and the possible risks and implications that come with
these practices, as well as being capable of implementing this knowledge
for a more empowered internet usage” (p. 2). One problem with using
the term ‘data literacy’ in the context of non-profits is that it tends to
target the competencies and critical awareness of individuals (D’Ignazio
& Bhargava, 2015; Frank et al., 2016) and thus seems less suited to con-
sidering organisation-level attributes.
Similarly, we are not enthusiastic about the term ‘data maturity’, even
though it suggests organisation-level qualities, because it conjures up the
notion of an ultimate ‘finish line’ and doesn’t account for the wide variety
of circumstances that shape the use of data. We opt to talk about data
capability because what we envisage are plural and dynamic qualities,
situated historically and culturally, that are fundamental to fostering
change across new socio-technological milieux. While ideas of data liter-
acy and maturity help by compiling skill and competency needs, our
approach is to democratise data practices, open up data expertise to all
parts of an organisation and push it beyond the IT department or the
bounds of appointing specialist data professionals. Our holistic concep-
tualisation of data capability resonates with Williams’ (2020) depiction
of ‘data action’ for public good—which is described as “a methodology, a
call to action that asks us to rethink our methods of using data to improve
or change policy” (p. xiii). Aligned with this call-to-action approach is a
widening of data accountability, responsibility and ethics. In short, data
capability involves more than ticking off attributes from a list but is about
evolving understanding, resourcing, implementing and doing, involving
people across organisations and in relevant communities, and interacting
with changing contexts and missions.
 1 Introduction 15

In this book, we provide examples of how non-profits can use data and
give practical strategies for non-profits to build data capability. The cen-
tral approach we offer for building new capability is collaborative data
action. Rather than consigning data solutions to individual projects or
teams, we encourage collaborative processes within and across organisa-
tions. In Chap. 2, we give case studies of using collaborative data action
with non-profits to generate new insights from using and re-using data.
In Chap. 3, we delineate the collaborative data action methodology and
highlight why it is particularly useful for non-profits. Based on our
research with non-profits, we distil out key issues for non-profits to pri-
oritise. Our mission is to put data analytics within the reach of all non-­
profits and to overcome isolationist and competitive data practices that
concentrate capability with the well-resourced (large) few. That is, not
replicating the logic of private enterprise, commercialism in data use and
start-up culture exceptionalism.
Part of the ‘magic’ of collaborative data action is bringing together dif-
ferent knowledges, skills and experiences because data analytics for non-­
profits is a hybrid activity (Verhulst, 2021; Williams, 2020). It requires
the skills of data scientists, but they tend to lack social science training. It
requires social scientists with grounding in evidence and methods of
social fields, and it needs practitioners because they know the practices
and operating contexts of non-profit work. As non-profits’ capability is
built, their data work increasingly must incorporate the voice and per-
spectives of clients, citizens and communities. To achieve this, it is neces-
sary to navigate the problematic environment that has arisen due to some
of the ways that social data analytics has been applied to date—that is, to
address the (ab)use of data causing social harm.

Navigating Data Harms by Involving Citizens

Part of the rationale for growing non-profits’ data capability is to bridge
the gap between desire to extract optimal social value from data, while
addressing the risks from (re-)using this data. Much of the data non-­
profits generate and work with is likely to be personal data about clients
and customers, perhaps sensitive and health-related data. Accountability
16 J. Farmer et al.

to clients, customers and communities around use and re-use of data is

paramount and challenging to execute well. At this point, as good data
safety practices and technology are available, challenges are mainly due to
a lack of established, evaluated models of good practice of how to work
with people to formulate governance principles and processes for re-using
data about them. And, building on this, how to engage citizens as empow-
ered partners in data projects that engage with their data.
Constructing sound practices for using and re-using citizen data
requires citizens at the table. In our experience of data projects with non-­
profits, they find it challenging even to think about holding discussions
with clients and consumers about how to develop such practices. They
appear afraid to mention ‘the d word’. This fear of engaging with clients
and consumers regarding data is linked largely to perceptions of risk due
to high-profile accounts of social data misuse. Critical accounts of datafi-
cation emphasise the way data has become a social and political issue “not
only because it concerns anyone who is connected to the Internet but also
because it reconfigures relationships between states, subjects, and citi-
zens” (Bigo et al., 2019, p. 3). Accounts about the impact of datafication
on society are multiple and sometimes depict grave consequences. They
exemplify harms from use of data analytics in replicating and driving
inequalities of race and ethnicity, gender and class, and concentrating
power in the globally dominant technology corporations (e.g., Criado-­
Perez, 2019; Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018; O’Neil, 2016; Srnicek, 2016).
High-profile failures to use data and technology in social welfare settings,
for example in Australia, the notorious failed Federal Government
‘Robodebt’ automated debt recovery programme based on welfare ser-
vices data (Henriques-Gomes, 2020), are mirrored internationally. Such
cases have eroded public confidence in institutions that would tradition-
ally be trusted to care for and about citizens and data.
Different countries and regions are beginning to clarify data rights and
heighten the accountable, responsible production and use of personal
and social data through high-level legislation, such as the European
Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (European
Parliament and the Council of the European Union, 2016), and pro-
posed Bills to regulate Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, there is still
ongoing uncertainty about what rules pertain in different contexts—and
 1 Introduction 17

even how to find out. Data security and privacy law and responsible data
governance are core elements of the context of non-profit data analytics,
but we also note that risk aversion around working with data can be the
immediate, and apparently easiest, response. Among non-profits highly
sensitive to social injustice, vulnerabilities and systemic inequality, the
idea of doing more with client and citizen data can be met with consider-
able anxiety, resulting in waiting until things get clearer (i.e., not re-using
data). We suggest a key reason why non-profits should grow their data
capability is so they can confidently and competently engage with clients,
citizens and communities around responsible data use. While there are
risks, and a need to proceed with caution, using citizen data for insights
could bring benefits to clients, customers and the wider community.
Data is already generated, so it is responsible re-use that is the central
issue to be resolved. There are, arguably, three key issues to be considered
in non-profits working with citizens and data: (1) developing sound data
governance practices, (2) working with citizens to gain insights from data
and (3) raising citizen data literacy and community data capability.
Some researchers have begun to explore how to involve ‘lay’ partici-
pants in discussions around responsible use of data. For example, the
Data Justice Lab (Warne et al., 2021) produced a civic participation
guidebook outlining participatory methods including citizens’ juries and
mini-publics (deliberative conversations) to discuss data use. Living labs
and hackathons are other methods discussed (e.g., Flowing Data, 2013).
These methods, though, tend to engage citizens in discussing large
administrative or government datasets, rather than making direct links
between citizens and re-use of data about them. There are some cases of
active engagement of citizens with deciding about uses of their own data;
for example, the Salus health data co-op in Barcelona involves people
making decisions about selective use of their data (e.g., for health
research), as opposed to making it entirely open or private and unavail-
able for re-use (Calzada, 2021). Open Humans (https://www.openhu-
mans.org) is a non-profit dedicated to supporting individuals and
communities to explore use of their data for social purposes. We found a
few examples of engaging more marginalised groups about their data,
and these are the citizens with which non-profits are most likely to work.
18 J. Farmer et al.

Here, perhaps, work on Indigenous data sovereignty indicates a useful

way ahead (Kukutai & Taylor, 2016). Data sovereignty is a way of under-
standing the importance of establishing consent and respecting the rights
of, and ensuring benefits for, those who are the subjects of data (Carroll
et al., 2020). In many parts of the world, Indigenous data sovereignty
working groups and scholars are defining and addressing data inequalities
and exploitation among those who have had least control and benefit
over data collected about them. Carroll et al. (2020) discuss the process
and rationale for developing the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data
Governance. CARE stands for: Collective benefit, Authority to control,
Responsibility, Ethics; and the principles are intended as a guide for stew-
ardship and processes to enable self-determining citizens to make deci-
sions relating to collection, storage, analysis, use and re-use of data. The
CARE principles were developed by Indigenous people due to wide-
spread abuse of data about them involving issues of over-surveillance, use
of data for policing, lack of transparency and control, and under-­counting
(thus under-representation). Data is as important to the sovereignty of a
people as language, artefacts, landmarks, beliefs and cultural knowledge,
and natural resources. As Tahu Kukutai and John Taylor eloquently
argue: “missing from those conversations have been the inherent and
inalienable rights and interests of indigenous peoples relating to the col-
lection, ownership and application of data about their people, lifeways
and territories” (Kukutai & Taylor, 2016, p. 2). Indigenous ways of
knowing can offer new models for data governance that are built on col-
laborative, rather than individual or proprietary responsibility, and more
respectful forms of consent. Work on Indigenous data sovereignty can
offer principles for wider application to engage with citizens represented
in data and who have experienced power inequities.
Moving beyond citizen engagement in designing data governance, cli-
ents and consumers should be engaged where non-profits re-use data
about them. This could involve data analyses relating to, for example,
situational awareness, impact assessment or for community insights. This
goes beyond acknowledging people’s representation in the data, but also
acknowledges their vital ‘lived experience’ roles in ground-truthing and
interpreting ‘what is going on’ in data analyses. Most contemporary non-­
profits have established relationships and ways of engaging
 1 Introduction 19

lived-experience clients and customers in informing and enabling services

so engagement with data analytics would represent an extension of such
work. Partnering with citizens about data is important for informing the
work of non-profits, and, as such, should be appropriately recompensed.
This acknowledges the expertise of citizen clients and customers as key
stakeholders in use, visualisation and interpretation of data that is about
them. As Williams (2020) notes, involving citizens is integral because
“data are people” (p. 220).
Some excellent examples of resources for involving citizens with lived
experience in data projects have been generated in recent years through
work of Elsa Falkenburger, Kathryn Pettit and others at the Urban
Institute and specifically its National Neighborhood Indicators
Partnership (NNIP; https://www.neighborhoodindicators.org/). These
community data advocates devised a ‘data walk’ methodology to engage
citizens with analysed and visualised datasets to help make decisions
about their communities (Murray et al., 2015). More recently, a short
Guide to Data Chats resource has been produced for practitioners, giving
really practical advice and tools for involving citizens with data (Cohen
et al., 2022). As part of the NNIP’s projects, citizens are often trained to
collect new, granular ‘citizen science’ data about aspects of living in
the locale.
The NNIP sees building community data capability as a key outcome
of engaging citizens in data projects. In their role as engaged with clients
and customers, non-profits could be significant in developing citizen and
community understanding around ethical data collection and use. As
digital inclusion becomes central to social equity agendas, non-profits’
data work with clients, customers and citizens could move beyond service
delivery and contribute to a wider social mission of building client data
literacy. This could be done by engaging people with their data, discuss-
ing issues such as sovereignty and potential to re-use data and generating
co-designed data governance. Such activities would centre clients and
consumers in non-profits’ data practices and contribute to building data
capability at community level.
Initiatives around the world are working to provide examples of ways
to engage citizens, for example Our Data Bodies (https://odbproject.org)
is a project working with low-income people in the US and data rights,
20 J. Farmer et al.

and Amnesty International is engaging with data volunteers to help orga-

nise crowd-sourced datasets (Acton, 2020). However, specifically consid-
ering the range of large and small non-profit organisations, our experience
of current practice is that non-profits’ engagement of consumers and cli-
ents in re-use of their data does seem to present quite a leap. Most non-­
profits we have worked with are still at the stage of building their own
internal data capability. As Sander (2020) concludes—with regard to citi-
zen engagement—there is, as yet, “too little knowledge on what kind of
literacy efforts work best and a lack of constructive or comprehensive
research on how to address people’s lack of knowledge” (p. 1). We argue
that non-profits’ management, boards and staff require their own data
knowledge, awareness and experience as a precursor to engaging clients
appropriately in conversations about data and involvement in codesign of
data use practices. This is not ideal but realistic based on our experiences.
Until this time, it is imperative that non-profits understand the consent
they have to gather, using this knowledge to work within general ethical
parameters (Williams, 2020).

Key Takeaways from This Chapter

In this chapter, we set the scene and introduce some key ideas about why
and how non-profits need to engage with data analytics. The key points
we’d like readers to take away are listed below.

Key Takeaways

• Non-profits should have the same access to data capability as commer-

cial businesses. They should build data capability so they can inform data
strategy for their organisation and the sector.
• Non-profits should resist generating new data if possible, rather they
should explore ways to re-use data they already generate and use open
social data instead.
• Once non-profits build their organisational data capability, they are
well-placed to work with clients and citizens to help build wider digital
inclusion and community data capability.
• Non-profit data analytics is a hybrid space that, at its best, draws on
multiple areas of knowledge, expertise and lived experience.
 1 Introduction 21

In the next chapter, we present case studies that illustrate our journey
of working with non-profits and data, from an earlier example of working
largely with social media data and government consultation submissions,
to working with non-profits exploring their own data, to generating a
data collaborative with non-profits and other organisations taking a
place-based approach (Chap. 2). We present our case studies in Chap. 2,
to give a picture of the different kinds of data projects we are talking
about in this book, but also because it was working on these projects that
led to the understanding of data capability we suggest here and our appre-
ciation of the benefits of working collaboratively. In Chap. 3, we build
out from those learnings from the case studies. We more fully describe
what data capability for non-profits looks like and outline the collabora-
tive data action methodology that we generated and refined while work-
ing on the case study projects and reflecting on similar work elsewhere.
In Chap. 4, we look to the future—discussing the way ahead for non-­
profits and data analytics for social good and suggesting research and
practice priorities. Data practices and regulation are dynamic and rapidly
changing so there will be new work that constantly refreshes and extends
what we say here. Our focus in this book is on what we gleaned from very
practical projects with practitioner partners. We note the book does not
provide a comprehensive international scoping of all uses of data for
social good or initiatives. Rather, here we tend to highlight the initiatives
and resources that we have drawn on most in developing our work (see
appendix for specific detail of these). We hope this book gives help and
inspiration to non-profits seeking data analytics for social good and
researchers working alongside them.

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 2
Case Studies of Data Projects

Chapter 1 made the case for non-profits building their data capability as
part of enabling their work for social good. This chapter jumps straight
into the reality of how organisations start to work with different types of
datasets and learn about working with data. We present three case studies
of our own research working with different non-profit (and other) organ-
isations and different internal re-used datasets, as well as open public
datasets. Each case study features collaborative data action and—we
argue—results in steps towards data capability. We jump straight to the
projects here because this is really what happened in our work. We took
our skillsets from our different research backgrounds—approximately
data science, communications and community development—and
looked at how we could partner with organisations to address their real
challenges. As well as having a problem to solve, each partner organisa-
tion we worked with also had a curiosity to find out about whether data
science could help. In our first case study, we worked with government
departments and agencies to understand the public conversation on fam-
ily violence and the impact of policy. For the second, we partnered with
three non-profits looking to solve social problems with data. Our final
case study is a collaboration with several community organisations and a

© The Author(s) 2023 27

J. Farmer et al., Data for Social Good, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5554-9_2
28 J. Farmer et al.

bank in a regional city. The case studies illustrate the evolution of our
work with data over 2017–2021, and how we came to arrive at collabora-
tive data action as a methodology as it was trialled and refined over a
series of studies. There are hints about what building data capability
involves in each case study, but we only started to build in processes of
evaluation as our studies progressed. Hence, the case studies have slightly
different formats. And only over this evolution of cases and other data
projects have we arrived at our understanding of data capability. This is
explored in Chap. 3.
We suggest the case studies show how data projects that involve social
mission-driven organisations benefit from combining multiple skills and
perspectives. This is because applying data science in domains of social
action is complex. It benefits from knowledge of relevant evidence,
acknowledging that ideology and values are always present, and above all
it benefits from practitioner expertise through their experience working
in contexts that highlight what is significant and how to address it. Our
case studies are light-on regarding the techniques of ‘big data’ science
because this is not a book on how to do data analytics technically. That is
covered in other texts (e.g., Aragon et al., 2022). In this chapter, we focus
more on what we did from an operational, indeed co-operational, stand-
point. We expand on what that means—the implications and how to
build data capability—more in Chaps. 3 and 4. Case study projects 2 and
3 took place during 2020–2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic when
extended lockdowns meant a lack of face-to-face engagement. The case
studies are as follows:
The project featured in Case Study 1 involved re-using data for insights
into the public conversation about family violence following implemen-
tation of new state family violence policy. Working mainly with a govern-
ment department concerned with family violence policy, but also in
consultations with non-profit stakeholders, the case study addresses how
to gain information about social outcomes by re-using qualitative datas-
ets generated via social media and public consultation. It thus exemplifies
some of the kinds of datasets, analyses and visualisations that non-profits
could use when looking for novel data to inform outcomes evaluation.
The project in Case Study 2 involved working with three non-profits
of different sizes. They partnered to learn if and how they could use
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 29

internal already-generated data to create added value, particularly around

showing their organisations’ direct and wider social impacts and, on the
other hand, to improve organisational effectiveness.
Case Study 3 illustrates how seven organisations, including non-profits
and a bank, worked together to find out if and how they could use their
internal data, plus open data, to find out more about their community.
They brought data together to generate geospatially visualised data layers
describing community resilience, including layers about social connec-
tion, financial wellbeing, homelessness and housing, and demand for
social services. The case highlights some of the potential and challenges in
sharing data amongst organisations.
Table 2.1 summarises the case studies including an overview of the
topic and nature of the collaboration, datasets used, analyses and visuali-
sations and key learnings.
At the end of this chapter, we compare some aspects across the cases,
mainly considering what was learned as this informs the themes about
building capability and collaboration that are extended in Chap. 3.

 ase Study 1: Outcomes of Family Violence

C
Policy—A Public Sector Collaboration
Project Goal

Explore the value of novel datasets to inform the State Government of

Victoria, Australia, about changes to the public conversation after it
introduced new policies to address family violence.

Project Description

The Victorian Government produced new family violence prevention

policies in 2017 in response to a Royal Commission investigation
(2015–2016). Alongside recommendations for public and community
sector reform, the government produced a framework of outcome indica-
tors. These tended to reflect aspirations for change and were considered
30 J. Farmer et al.

Table 2.1 Summary data projects case comparison

Topic and Analyses/
collaboration Data visualisations Key learning
Case 1: Family Internal data: Timelines, topics Participants found
violence policy Consultation volume of new insights to
outcomes. submissions topics over inform policy
Multiple External data: time, outcomes and
government Twitter, Media influential developed greater
agencies and reporting data people and confidence with
non-profits organisations using data
Case 2: Re-using Internal data: Graphs, Participants felt
operational Operational geospatial more in control
data. Multiple datasets about journey and knowledgeable
departments staff and service visualisations that they could use
and staff of locations, operational data
three employee for strategy and
non-profits training, impact evaluation
journeys, surveys
External data:
Government
open data, City
environmental
reports
Case 3: Internal data: Interactive data Participants
Community Surveys, housing dashboard with developed
resilience and service geospatial confidence about
indicators data locations, (map) using data, critique
collaborative. customer data visualisations of practices and
Multiple External data: by suburb, challenges. They
organisations in Government graphs and pie developed
a regional city open data charts relationships of
trust and learned
about each other’s
work

difficult to measure, particularly those related to improved awareness,

understanding and attitudes about family violence in the community.
Some of the outcomes were complicated to assess; for example, while the
policy sought a “reduction in all family violence behaviours” (State
Government of Victoria, n.d., p. 6), family violence incident reporting
rose, possibly because people were more comfortable with coming forward
and were supported to do so with better services. Simply measuring
changes in crime statistics, therefore, gave potentially misleading results.
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 31

We worked with government and government agency partners to tar-

get outcomes relating to changes in public discussion. We assessed
changes by analysing: (a) the public consultation submissions that
informed the new policy (to establish a baseline of core family violence
issues) collected in 2015 and (b) public discussion through social media
data (Twitter) and news media reporting to understand how the public
conversation changed in response to public policy during 2014–2018.

Collaborating Partners

The project was instigated by the Victorian Department of Premier and

Cabinet (DPC). The DPC leads the whole of Victoria state government
policy and performance, coordinating activities to help the government
achieve its strategic objectives.
Other partners that collaborated on this project were:

• Women Victoria, a state government department promoting gender

equality and women’s leadership.
• Respect Victoria, an agency funded by but independent of state govern-
ment, dedicated to the primary prevention of all forms of family vio-
lence and violence against women.
• Family Violence Branch at the Department of Premier and Cabinet,
Victorian Government.
• Family Safety Victoria, the Victorian Government agency leading the
implementation of family violence reforms.
• Business Insights Unit at the Department of Premier and Cabinet,
Victorian Government.
• Social Data Analytics Lab at Swinburne University of Technology.

How the Project Began

The project started with discussions with the DPC in mid-2018 about
the feasibility of re-using external data sources to inform outcomes. This
was an exploratory project and, as a first step, our DPC partners spent
32 J. Farmer et al.

several months identifying a suitable topic and group of stakeholders.

Criteria for selection were as follows: that it should be a non-controversial
topic area; there should be pre-existing good relationships between rele-
vant agencies and departments; and stakeholders were open to novel data
analytics. The DPC had its own Business Insights Unit that analysed
data, so these staff were involved with the aim of complementing, not
replicating, the work they were already doing. Initial workshops were
held involving our multi-disciplinary university researcher team and
partner staff, and this led to identifying data sources and likely useful
types of analysis.

Summary of Datasets Used

Data sources (see Table 2.2) were selected to provide insights into public
discussions about family violence over the five-year study period, allow-
ing comparisons year by year.

Table 2.2 Data sources for public discussion of family violence

Open
public or
re-used
internal
Topic Source Datasets data
Informed Royal Commission into 838 public submissions; Re-used
public and Family Violence we used a stratified
policy public submissions sample of 105
documents submissions
Public Twitter, 99,840 Twitter posts from Open
discussion #familyviolence, 2819 geographically public
#domesticviolence dispersed Australian
Twitter users
Public Australian news media, 11,451 news articles from Open
discourse via MIT Media Cloud Australian national and public
platform regional news sources
(including newspapers,
radio and TV)
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 33

Methods

Discussion Workshops A steering group with representatives of project

partners met six times during the project. Early workshops established
questions to pursue in the data analysis and identified a timeline of policy
events from 2014. As data was analysed—and explored through subse-
quent workshops—the group gave feedback on findings and input to aid
further analysis. Through these workshops, a collaborative analysis strat-
egy was developed.

Data Analysis Data analysis techniques were chosen to fit datasets and
project goals. To discover semantic patterns within the large bodies of
text data from the three datasets, natural language processing (NLP) was
used to augment qualitative content and thematic analysis. This involved
word frequency and clustering analysis, using Pearson Coefficient
Correlation analysis (Pearson’s r), and the topic modelling method Latent
Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The approach to analysis is informed by
established theory in policy analysis, frame analysis and socio-linguistics
that addresses the formation of public social issues and understands the
role of language and communication in ‘framing’ or shaping and contest-
ing the parameters of those issues.
A timeline analysis of the Twitter dataset identified peaks in discussion
across the five-year timeframe and matched these with known policy or
public events. Named entity recognition was also used to identify key
individuals and organisations and their prominence at different times.
Submissions to the Royal Commission Public Inquiry (2015) The
sample of public submissions was analysed using word frequency and
thematic clustering, as well as qualitative content analysis to establish a
baseline of the key policy dimensions framing family violence. The sub-
missions were taken as a proxy for the attitudes and topics discussed by
an informed public—that is, the diverse individuals, community sector
and services, government and research voices, who have experiences of
family violence or work with victim survivors or perpetrators.
34 J. Farmer et al.

Twitter Corpus (January 2014–December 2018) To identify topics in

the Twitter dataset over the target timeframe, a sampling strategy was
used, ­generating a maximum of 500 tweets per week. To inform the time-
line analysis, this sample was supplemented by extracting the Twitter
counts endpoint which returns the total tweet count at each timepoint.
This allows quantification of tweets beyond the 500 per week sample.

LDA topic modelling was applied to Twitter posts for each year. Since
LDA is an unsupervised learning model, there is no ground-truth on the
number of topics, and therefore it is the researcher’s responsibility to vali-
date the appropriate number of topic clusters. For our study, the number
of topics identified for each year is established by model parameter checks.
The topic modelling process established a range of topic options, and
these were reviewed by the researchers on the team to identify the most
coherent and distinct topics, with the number of topics varying each year.
News Media Corpus (January 2014–December 2018) The meta-data
captured via the API for each article included the source name (media
outlet), time and date of the article. We cleaned the media dataset by
scraping the body of the articles from provided links. Stories with invalid
URL links and duplicate stories published in more than one outlet were
removed, retaining the first published article. LDA topic modelling was
applied to the news media corpus, and a hand-annotated topic descriptor
was associated with each cluster.
With all the datasets, reliability of machine analysis was checked by man-
ual qualitative coding of samples of data items (tweets, stories and public
submissions) and inter-coder reliability checks involving four people
independently coding samples. The team checked emergent topics against
the outcomes framework we were seeking to inform, existing research
evidence and the Royal Commission reports.

Findings

We reported a range of findings that helped identify the longer-term

changes in the way family violence was discussed and were able to esti-
mate the main effects of the Royal Commission and subsequent policy
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 35

initiatives. These changes, observable through the different public dis-

course datasets (news, Twitter, public inquiry submissions), were mapped
against the government’s official outcome indicators. A number of dia-
grams and chart types were chosen to present the most salient findings.
These choices matter, and working with large corpus natural language or
text datasets meant that innovative techniques had to be used to convey
findings concisely and dynamically.
A tree diagram was used to visualise five core thematic dimensions of
family violence identified through analysis of the Royal Commission pub-
lic submissions and policy reports, which were victims, perpetrators, causes
and contexts, systems, and solutions. These dimensions served as a baseline
and were used to compare changes to the public conversation thereafter.
Two standard graphs were used to quantify public discussion of family
violence, and show change over time, against the five Royal Commission
dimensions. This revealed alignment and divergence between public dis-
course and policy frameworks.
Two ribbon graphs (see Fig. 2.1) were used to represent and quantify
the change in news media and Twitter topics, between 2014 and 2018,
and the continuity and discontinuity of those topics. We drew out
insights from this analysis. For example, in Twitter data, victim survivors
and perpetrators are discussed more directly and pointedly, and victim
survivors voice their own experiences, to a far greater extent than in news
media and policy reports and inquiry submissions. At a high level, we
showed that the public conversation changed in relation to the 2015
hearings of the Royal Commission and policy framing. Unlike Twitter,
which consistently followed the hearings and amplified the issues it
raised, news media reporting was much slower to change or respond to
the Royal Commission. The news coverage only took off with the rise of
the #MeToo movement in late 2018.
A Twitter timeline graph identified key public events against peaks and
troughs in Twitter activity (Fig. 2.2). This helped to discover when there
was attention to key policy events and other influential public actions
and controversies.
Bubble charts were also used, drawing on named entity analysis, which
quantifies mentions of people or organisations in the data. This showed
the relationship between Twitter and news media items by key topic area
and influential people and organisations. These changed over time.
 36 J. Farmer et al.

Volume of Tweets

Men’s Actions
Culture
Systems
Law Reform
Advocacy
Experiences
Policing
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Fig. 2.1 Topic modelling analysis of Twitter topics related to family violence
2014–2018. Note: Ribbon graph adapted from data in “Community responses to
family violence: Charting policy outcomes using novel data sources, text mining
and topic modelling”. by A. McCosker, J. Farmer, and A. Soltani Panah, 2020,
Swinburne University of Technology, p. 24, https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/
resource-­files/2020-­03/apo-­nid278041.pdf. (Copyright 2020 by Swinburne
University of Technology. Adapted with permission)

Through the named entity analysis, we identified key players in the public
debates surrounding family violence over the target period. This included
politicians, advocates and activists, as well as news organisations.

Outcomes and Lessons Learned

The data analysis gave fresh insights relating to how family violence was
discussed and changes over time post-policy change. It showed the DPC
that there were datasets that could inform their outcomes about public
attitude and public discussion changes. Where they had previously relied
on community surveys that tend to feature limited demographics in
response, by re-using other datasets they could access a wider range of
attitudes and language. Analysis raised new issues that they had not
thought about previously, such as what topics were featured in policy
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 37

Fig. 2.2 Timeline and peaks of Twitter activity addressing family violence by year
(2015 and 2016 represented). Note: Twitter timeline analysis graph adapted from
data in “Community responses to family violence: Charting policy outcomes using
novel data sources, text mining and topic modelling”. by A. McCosker, J. Farmer,
and A. Soltani Panah, 2020, Swinburne University of Technology, p. 29, https://
apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-­f iles/2020-­0 3/apo-­n id278041.pdf.
(Copyright 2020 by Swinburne University of Technology. Adapted with permission)

compared with public concerns. For example, there was limited and
abstract discussion of perpetrators, but as time passed, there was more
nuanced discussion on Twitter about men as perpetrators and social and
structural factors influencing family violence. That the news media con-
tinued sensationalising tropes about violence showed that government
still needed to do more to influence news media reporting. They found
out that the public uses different and diverse words (compared to policy)
to depict and discuss forms of family violence, particularly using the term
‘abuse’. An evolving timeline of public responses highlighted that policy
events influenced volume and duration of peaks in Twitter discussion
more than some very serious crime events. Analyses also highlighted how
particular people and organisations influence the conversation in differ-
ent directions. Together, the analyses gave a much more nuanced perspec-
tive about how the public responds to policy that could inform useful
changes to policy over time.
38 J. Farmer et al.

The project featured collaborative research around evaluating outcomes

in relation to a significant social policy issue with government depart-
ments and arms-length agencies. As such, it showed that through collabo-
rating to bring multiple knowledges and skills to the table, existing data
could be re-used to find evidence, rather than collecting new data. We
introduced new types of data and analytical methods and showed how
partners’ current social media analysis could be refined and extended.
The work led to our research team developing ongoing relationships
with the departments and agencies. Specifically, it also led to a presenta-
tion at a key government knowledge transfer event and to newly funded
research about accessing, integrating and analysing the government’s lon-
gitudinal datasets on family violence.
Re-using data and using novel data analytics techniques is challenging,
and in large, traditional, bureaucratic organisations requires determined
champions to drive experimentation and change. While we were fortunate
to work with a series of senior advocates within government, the project
was hampered by multiple senior staff changes throughout the study
period, affecting continuity, support and understanding of the work.
The collaborative processes we used may appear time-intensive, but
they offer substantial methodological benefits from bringing in different
expertise, perspectives and questions and achieve direct impact in influ-
encing knowledge and awareness about data amongst those that partici-
pate. Potentially, these representatives are inspired to return to their
departments and agencies and be more confident about advocating for
using data and growing skills in data use.
For further information about the project see McCosker et al. (2020).

 ase Study 2: Re-using Operational Data

C
with Three Non-Profits
Project Goal

Explore the relevance and feasibility of data analytics for non-profits

through deploying a collaborative data action methodology.
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 39

Project Description

Australian non-profits are aware of the rise of the data analytics movement,
but many lack the capability and resources that would allow them to fully
utilise their data via analytics. The three non-profit partners in this proj-
ect provide services for different target groups and have different existing
requirements to use data—including to report to external funders and
government regulators. Each has gathered a set of datasets over a number
of years in relation to their work.
We facilitated a series of iterative workshops with staff to identify their
organisational ‘pain points’ (i.e., problems and questions), understand
their datasets and determine if and how data analytics could be used to
provide new insights that could guide future strategies. We also devel-
oped a series of educational webinars about working with data, including
information on relevant laws, local policies, technological tools and open
data portals. Non-profits’ staff were interviewed at the beginning of the
project to assess aspects of their existing organisational data capability
and their hopes and expectations. Interviews were repeated at the end of
the project to discover benefits and reflect on learning and challenges.
The project ran from 2020 to early 2021. While originally we envis-
aged multiple face-to-face meetings and training sessions, ultimately all
sessions were conducted online. Both non-profits’ staff and researchers
spent several months in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic and
dealt with multiple operational challenges while they participated in the
project.

Collaborating Partners

The project was funded by the Lord Mayors Charitable Foundation

(LMCF) (a philanthropic foundation based in Melbourne), the non-­
profit organisations that participated, and a small grant from our univer-
sity. The non-profit partners were:

1. Yooralla, an organisation providing services for people with disabilities

in their homes and the community.
40 J. Farmer et al.

2. Good Cycles, a social enterprise that provides supported employment

for young people who might otherwise have difficulty accessing jobs
and training due to social and economic disadvantage. Good Cycles
engages young people in work experience including in operating retail
bicycle shops, mobile car share cleaning, bike share, and parcel deliv-
eries and logistics—all using cargo bikes instead of cars or trucks. In
addition to providing training and employment, the organisation pro-
motes urban sustainability.
3. Entertainment Assist, a charity that raises awareness about mental
health and wellbeing in workplaces and for employees in the Australian
entertainment industry. Entertainment Assist offers a mental health
training programme (Intermission) for staff and employers.

How the Project Began

Leaders at the LMCF partnered with our team because they were inter-
ested to explore the potential of new capabilities in understanding and
using data from partnering with a university data lab to find, examine,
analyse and visualise data.
Once initial partial funding from LMCF was secured, the next step
was to identify and attract three or four non-profits that would also co-­
fund their participation. Establishing agreement from the non-profits to
participate sometimes took several conversations over two to three
months, involving researchers, non-profit managers and staff. The
researchers shared examples from past data projects, as well as gave exam-
ples from initiatives like The GovLab (https://datacollaboratives.org) and
NESTA UK’s data analytics projects and reports. While there was strong
initial interest from potential partners, negotiating to the point of secur-
ing participation and funding was a significant challenge. As the
COVID-19 pandemic hit, one partner (a large community health service
provider) was forced to withdraw to focus on core business.
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 41

Summary of Datasets Used

We focused on re-using non-profit partners’ internal datasets but drew on

open public datasets to support and complement these datasets, helping
to produce new insights (Table 2.3).

Table 2.3 Datasets used in the three non-profits’ analyses

Open
public data
or re-used
Non-profit internal
organisation/topic Source Datasets data
Entertainment Intermission Participant responses to Re-used
Assist/impacts on evaluation mental health training by
mental health survey data demographics
and wider social
impact
Australian National Survey of Mental Open
Bureau of Health and Wellbeing: public
Statistics Summary of results, 2008
Good Cycles/ Transitional Geospatial data about Re-used
worker skills Employment trainees’ bicycle journeys
development, Programme while delivering services
social and data
environmental
impact
City of Congestion, emissions and Open
Melbourne health outcomes related public
Transport to transport
Strategy 2030
Yooralla/employee Human Staff travel to work, during Re-used
wellbeing and resources and work and training data
retention training data
Australian Data by Region, Population Open
Bureau of and People levels of public
Statistics post-secondary school
qualifications and median
levels of general
population employee
income across Melbourne
2014–2019
42 J. Farmer et al.

Methods

Educational Webinar Series A webinar series was designed aiming to

familiarise non-profit partners’ staff with foundational concepts about
data analytics in the context of their sector. Five webinars were pre-­
recorded by the research team and distributed via email weblink, with
supporting resources and recommended readings. Webinars ran con-
currently with the co-design workshops from August to November
2020. Topics covered included introducing data projects, data ethics
and governance, data collaborative methodologies, sharing a technol-
ogy toolkit and next steps in organisational data analytics. A final
interactive webinar was conducted via Zoom in February 2021, bring-
ing non-profit staff participants and the university team together to
share project findings and insights.

Discussion Workshops Staff from each non-profit participated in three

data analytics workshops specifically exploring their questions and
data. The workshops covered the following:

Workshop 1: Goals of the project, key ‘pain-points’ and questions, and

identifying internal datasets;
Workshop 2: Review and discussion of initial data analyses and
visualisations;
Workshop 3: ‘Deeper dives’ into organisational data visualisations, use of
other open public datasets to enrich analyses and discussion of how to
communicate and apply data analyses.

The non-profits were responsible for identifying relevant internal data-

sets and ensuring these were de-identified according to the Australian
Privacy Act 1988. These datasets were shared with Swinburne researchers
via SharePoint (a secure enterprise file-sharing platform).
Following workshops 1 and 2, the research team’s data scientists
worked with non-profits’ staff to generate visualisations based on part-
ners’ internal datasets. Following workshop 3, some open public data
sources were analysed and visualised to compare or add value to internal
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 43

data analyses. These processes involving non-profit staff in processes of

cleaning, obtaining, analysing and visualising data provided opportuni-
ties for non-profit staff to identify potential value from data analytics as
well as to understand the work, technologies and governance issues
involved. Collaborative working between university and non-profits’ staff
inspired discussions about future investments in data science capability-­
building for their organisations.
The workshop approach drew on aspects of the data walk method pio-
neered by the Washington DC based Urban Institute (Murray et al.,
2015). This method focuses on visualising data and sharing and discuss-
ing visualisations as a method of collaboration, participation and itera-
tively honing analyses to address participants’ questions.

Data Analysis

Entertainment Assist Data scientists from the research team worked

with Entertainment Assist to generate several different visualisations
using the Intermission course evaluation survey data. Descriptive statistics
and sentiment analysis were applied. In workshop discussions, differences
between managers and staff cohorts undertaking the training were identi-
fied, and this drove a next round of data analysis further exploring the
responses from these groups. Workshop 3 raised the idea of comparing
programme participants by job, as those taking the course range from
young performing artists to older technical staff. Word clouds, sentiment
analysis and other types of statistical analyses compared data from the
Intermission dataset with data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’
Australian National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing. The com-
parison generated new insights about the potential impacts of the
Intermission programme for particular at-risk cohorts as highlighted by
national data.

Good Cycles Data about training by employee from the Transitional

Employment Program dataset was initially used to generate an analysis of
tracking workers’ progress in building employment skills over time.
Thereafter, worker journey data was used to generate a geospatial visuali-
44 J. Farmer et al.

sation of data showing 2514 trainees’ bicycle journeys during the course
of service delivery over three months. Bicycle journeys were visualised as
trails on a map of Melbourne’s suburbs.

Building on these initial analyses, geospatial data about trainee journeys

from Good Cycles facilities to customer sites was compared with envi-
ronmental modelling data from the City of Melbourne Transport Strategy
2030 (City of Melbourne, 2020) to help calculate the environmental
benefits, in terms of reduced traffic congestion, reduced carbon emissions
and improved citizen health outcomes, of employees travelling by bicycle
as opposed to car or truck.

Yooralla Yooralla was interested to improve staff experiences of work,

and analysis began by examining internal operational human resources
and training datasets. Geospatial and temporal visualisations were
initially generated, showing aggregated data about staff demographics,
rostering history and training by Yooralla service location. Thereafter, an
objective became to discover variables linked to staff retention, and one
target suggested to explore was to compare staff demographics with
distances travelled to reach workplaces. A key question pursued was—
might distance travelled to their workplace influence staff retention?
For discussion at workshop 3, datasets analysed included Australian
Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data about median levels of general population
employee income across Melbourne, compared with geospatial postcode
data for Yooralla employees and geospatial postcode data about employ-
ees’ primary workplace (ABS, 2020a). Datasets were compared for any
insights relating to associations between median income for suburbs and
staff home and work locations.

Findings

Insights from Data Analyses Each non-profit participated in generat-

ing analyses and visualisations that they considered helpful in under-
standing and explaining the challenges they brought to the project. As
examples, staff of Entertainment Assist were able to better understand the
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 45

significance of their training course for particular target groups and to

consider how training might be tailored for different groups. For exam-
ple, young, mostly female dance students and stagehands who are mostly
middle-aged men would both be key target groups but would need dif-
ferently configured training content.

Data analysis and visualisations generated allowed Good Cycles to dem-

onstrate their contribution to the environmental sustainability of Greater
Melbourne because the impact of employees’ travel by bicycle could be
calculated in terms of impact on congestion, emissions and public health.
Figure 2.3 provides an indication of how Good Cycles’ employees jour-
ney data can be shown. This particular depiction selects out only three
cycling employees’ journeys across Melbourne from the Good Cycles’
depot but serves to show the type of geospatial visualisation that Good
Cycles found useful.
Insights for Yooralla included understanding the impact of the locations
of their service hubs (often in higher income suburbs) in relation to where

ESSENDON

NORTHCOTE
BRUNSWICK

FLEMINGTON

BRAYBROOK

CARLTON

FOOTSCRAY MELBOURNE RICHMOND

SOUTH MELBOURNE

ALTONA NORTH
PRAHRAN

Fig. 2.3 Geospatial visualisation of three Good Cycles’ employee journeys

46 J. Farmer et al.

their staff could afford to live (a majority resided in mid-lower income

suburbs). Disparities meant staff had long journeys to work and this
potentially related to staff retention. Through a visualisation of internal
and ABS employment and income datasets, Yooralla saw that the average
daily commute for their employees was nearly 60 km return journey. This
is considerably further than the average Australian commuting distance
(ABS, 2020b). This led the Yooralla team to consider whether new work
practices and staff work locations could be significant when trying to
improve staff retention. Insights generated from the work ultimately led
Yooralla to develop new policies for employee rostering.

From the Before and After Interviews

The non-profits’ managers shared their initial goals for participating in

interviews held at the start of the project. The main themes are sum-
marised below, with illustrative quotes.
Improve organisational data know-how: “The best-case outcome is
that … we improve our definitions, we improve our measurement, and
we improve our data collection … and we have a culture, we have a dis-
cipline around capturing data” (Entertainment Assist).
Inform organisation strategy: “I think we’ve got very rich data. We’ve got
a lot of data. And obviously, it’s getting through all of that information
and providing it that will inform change, that will inform improvements,
that will make changes for the better”(Yooralla).
Generate new insights: “I think there is an opportunity…to look at
what other areas we could be exploring with this data. I think there is an
opportunity to actually look at all the information that we have—and
look at it in different ways, and look at it in more meaningful ways”
(Good Cycles).
Show outcomes and impacts to funders: “Obviously there are a number
of incredibly generous philanthropic organisations out there and seeking
support for particular programs and projects is an important part of our
work. [This project] … helps us to quantify some of the outcomes that
we’re seeking to achieve” (Entertainment Assist).
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 47

At the end of the project, participants identified immediate benefits

from using data visualisations in reports to board members and funding
bodies. For example, Good Cycles used a visualisation as part of a com-
petitive tendering process to show the advantages their use of bicycle
transport had for the environment:

[The client] said, ‘What’s your footprint? What sort of area can we cover?’
So, I got [Swinburne data scientist] to send me the heat map … I packaged
that up and we sent that back to the client, to demonstrate how far north
of the CBD [Central Business District] we go, how far south-east and west.
It was good, it was a valuable piece of data. (Good Cycles)

All participants reported that the iterative workshop discussions of visu-

alised data helped them to understand challenges and impacts associated
with using their data which built their skills for working with data. One
organisation, for example, realised there was a need to streamline current
use of open text in reporting processes to generate more consistent and
useful information:

People would put in the same concept [into the database] in 40 different
ways … [It was] a bit of a wake-up call for us, and it really clarified that
there’s only five major classifications that we want to look at in terms of
risk, and that it’s actually easier for us to show what the problems are to
stakeholders if we just use five risk classifications. (Yooralla)

Outcomes and Lessons Learned

The project took a long time to start, partly due to challenges of the pan-
demic and lockdowns, but also because potential partner non-profits
were uncertain about committing to participation. In preliminary inter-
views, staff ‘confessed’ their lack of formal training in data analytics or
their lack of experience with specific tools or resources for managing and
visualising data. Some expressed embarrassment about the ‘messiness’ of
their organisation’s data. While most participants worked with data to
some degree, all assessed their understanding of data practices as limited.
48 J. Farmer et al.

Concern was particularly acute where large volumes of data were

already generated. Participants discussed workarounds to deal with poor
systems or their lack of know-how. For example, one participant described
downloading datasets from the organisation’s proprietary human
resources software, which they then manually imported into Excel to
generate monthly reports.
A key finding from the project was that through collaborating with the
university team, non-profit staff and leaders developed a different phi-
losophy of thinking about data. They started to view data, its collection,
and stewardship as a resource management issue, with datasets as resources
that were useful to them depending on their skills and knowledge around
using them. This was a shift from thinking about data as a compliance
issue, something they had to do to assuage funders and regulators. Non-­
profit participants started to think about protecting and owning the value
in data with an eye to the insights they could glean from different types
of analyses.
Despite multiple challenges caused by working during the pandemic
and its lockdowns, project aims were met. Unforeseen impacts included
participants reporting that working with data sparked new collaboration
between internal staff teams that had previously been siloed. This
prompted new thinking about ways the combined teams might work
with other organisations to combine resources and build data
collaborations.
For further information about the project, see Albury et al. (2021).

 ase Study 3: City of Greater Bendigo

C
Data Collaborative
Project Goal

Assess the feasibility and potential benefits of a community data

collaborative.
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 49

Project Description

Place-based planning and collaboration to address community challenges

is encouraged in Australian government policy (Government of Victoria,
2020). However, planning for rural places is challenged by lack of data at
meaningful spatial levels (Payton Scally et al., 2020). Forming a data col-
laborative could help by enabling re-use and pooling of data from mul-
tiple sources, including non-profits’ internal data and open public data.
In this project, seven organisations collaborated with university research-
ers to test the feasibility and potential of pooling and sharing data. The
City of Greater Bendigo covers a population of 120,000 living in urban
suburbs and rural localities. It is 153 kms (two hours’ drive) from central
Melbourne, the capital of the state of Victoria, Australia. Working with
managers of the partner organisations, the project identified, obtained,
analysed and visualised open public datasets and organisations’ internal
datasets, with mainly geospatial analysis and visualisation by suburbs and
localities. During 2021, a series of workshops involving organisation staff
and researchers were held to discuss topics of interest, identify datasets,
consider useful ways to analyse data and then to discuss mainly geospa-
tially analysed and visualised of datasets. Ultimately, this process informed
development of a prototype community resilience indicator dashboard.

Collaborating Partners

Partner organisations included a national bank; City of Greater Bendigo

council; Haven Home Safe, a non-profit homelessness services provider;
Murray Primary Health Network, a government-funded primary health
services commissioning organisation; Women’s Health Loddon Mallee, a
women’s health service; and Bendigo Community Health Service and
Heathcote Health Service, two community healthcare providers servicing
different parts of the City of Greater Bendigo area. Our Swinburne
University Social Data Analytics Lab team worked alongside the com-
munity partners.
50 J. Farmer et al.

How the Project Began

The project started because a community health service manager was

interested in exploring whether a data collaborative could help to over-
come lack of data to help assess services’ impacts on local health and
wellbeing. The manager mobilised a group of other managers of local
organisations to form a data collaborative working with our team of data
science and social science researchers.
An initial workshop discussed practicalities of data collaboratives and
presented examples of international community data initiatives, such as
those led by the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and The
GovLab. Following this, the organisations each contributed to a fund (to
an approximate total of US$50,000) to form a data collaborative, and
they nominated a lead organisation. Their self-organisation meant the
partners committed to work with each other from the start.
As well as an overall contract between the university and the lead
organisation, individual data-sharing agreements had to be established
between the university and each organisation. We provided a standard
template, but each organisation had to generate separately a data-sharing
document agreed by their lawyers. This variously took one to five months
to organise. As each agreement was signed, we started working with their
staff to identify datasets and analyse their data.
While established methodologies about the process of data projects
emphasise the need to start with a focused problem or question (GovLab,
2022), our partners found it difficult to identify a specific shared prob-
lem. All were interested in community wellbeing and resilience and
potentially had datasets that could inform those topics. Consequently, we
suggested developing layers of geospatially visualised data, each layer
broadly relating to a community resilience topic. Given the partner
organisations, the topic-focused data layers we suggested were social con-
nection/isolation, caring, financial wellbeing, housing/homelessness and
community health service use.
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 51

Summary of Datasets Used

We used open public datasets as well as re-using partners’ internal datas-

ets, as Table 2.4 shows.

Methods

Discussion Workshops Six workshops of organisation representatives

were held at key stages. Early workshops established organisations’ mis-
sions, topics of interest and relevant datasets. Discussions with organisa-
tions were ongoing between workshops, particularly about establishing

Table 2.4 Datasets for community resilience data collaborative

Open public
data or
Datasets (examples re-used
Topic Source only) internal data
Social Australian Bureau of Cohorts at risk of Open public
connection Statistics (ABS) social isolation (e.g.,
2016 Census men >65 living
alone)
Financial Bank Relative savings by Re-used
wellbeing suburb
Government benefits
payments by suburb
Council Population Perceived financial Re-used
Wellbeing Survey wellbeing
Food security
Housing and Housing and Social housing Re-used
homelessness homelessness locations, type and
services provider uptake
Services to people at
risk of homelessness
Health Council Population Life satisfaction Re-used
Wellbeing Survey Perceived health
Social determinants of
health
Community health Demand for various Re-used
services types of services
52 J. Farmer et al.

data-sharing agreements. Datasets were analysed by the researchers in

liaison with organisation staff and explored collaboratively through sub-
sequent workshops. These revealed insights, as identified by partner
organisations, enabled discussion of caveats of the datasets and included
and considered useful ways to present the data while maintaining uniden-
tifiability and paying heed to emergent considerations for partners. For
example, we discussed how to present bank data—ultimately this was
presented as an index of financial wellbeing, along with other relevant
financial wellbeing datasets. The workshop process helped to build rela-
tionships, mutual knowledge and trust between the partners, even though
most workshops were held online.

Data Analysis

Geospatial visualisation by suburbs was adopted as an analytical approach

because most of the datasets had location data, and a place-based approach
resonated with partners. As well as considering what open public data
was available, each collaborating partner also worked to identify internal
datasets that could be re-used and shared. A set of criteria drove identifi-
cation of datasets to include, as follows:

• data about a topic that aligns with the idea of community resilience;
• data that is analysable by suburb;
• either data subjects that are unidentifiable or data that could be aggre-
gated to achieve non-identifiability;
• caveats around the datasets should be transparent (e.g., the denomina-
tor of the dataset, how data was collected and the nature of consent
obtained must be known).

Flexibility was required because some datasets were not analysable by

suburb, meaning we had to explore other ways to analyse and present
some data.
Once each organisation worked through the process of generating a
data-sharing agreement, partner organisation managers then shared their
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 53

dataset(s) with researchers in a suitable format for analysis. Some organ-

isations were able to navigate this stage more quickly than others, depend-
ing on data governance practices and availability of dedicated data staff.
It was particularly challenging (and for some organisations, impossible)
to obtain aggregated data about health services.
Some requested help to export their data. Organising data by suburb
was not a standard metric for all organisations. Some collect data at post-
code or local government area (LGA) level, which was insufficiently gran-
ular for the analyses sought. Suburbs have the disadvantage that they
have highly varied population sizes, with some (especially rural localities)
having small populations (sometimes <50). This makes it challenging to
report results as unidentifiable and reduces the reliability of the Census-­
derived datasets, because the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) intro-
duces deliberate errors when numbers are low, to protect privacy.
Given the caveats above, datasets were aggregated by suburb where
possible and then combined into a single table using the R programming
language. The data was exported, joined to a shapefile of suburbs and
displayed as a colour-coded geospatial visualisation (map) using PowerBI.
To facilitate comparisons between datasets, data was expressed as pro-
portions of people or households. Different datasets had different sam-
ples—so, some were reported as a proportion of the entire population,
while others were reported as proportions of other denominators, for
example, of respondents to the council survey, by suburb.

Findings

Community Resilience Data Dashboard With most datasets analysed

by suburb, the geospatial map format shown in Fig. 2.4 was favoured by
most workshop participants. One, two or four maps could be shown on
the screen so simultaneous comparisons could be made between different
topics or different indicators or datasets about the same broad topic.
Ultimately, a data dashboard was generated with an opening interface
showing the different topics—Social Connection, Financial Wellbeing
and so on. Users could click through to datasets on these topics and view
data geospatially visualised as maps with other graphical representations
54 J. Farmer et al.

Fig. 2.4 City of Greater Bendigo Community resilience dashboard layers

by suburb

also available on-screen for deeper dives. As examples, social connection

by suburb also shows a bar graph by age group. Also, suburbs could be
clicked on via the map, for more granular information about age group
and other demographics, by suburb.

From the Before and After Interviews

Interviews with partner organisations were held at project start and end.
Below, issues raised at each stage are summarised, with some example
quotes. This serves to highlight the outcomes and process of change for
participants.
At the start of the project, participants raised three main aspirations:
access to data, connecting with data, and building capability. These are
summarised below, sometimes with illustrative quotes.
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 55

Issues About Data Themes discussed related to lack of access to useful

data, including low granularity, insufficiently current data and decline in
tailored help from government statistical agencies as their funding has
contracted. Partners were frustrated by apparent complete inaccessibility
of some datasets (e.g., health data) and hoped the project would help
them to find ways to access this data or to find out why it was so hidden.
In terms of their own data, partners sometimes noted feeling over-
whelmed; for example, “We have just so much data that’s in our systems,
but actually being able to pull it out and make sense of it and gain insight
and intelligence from it is a continuous challenge” (homelessness service).
All were intrigued by the potential to use data more and sought to probe
the benefits and boundaries of data re-use.

Connecting with Data Participants saw beyond the immediate chal-

lenges and thought working together with data could be a catalyst for
bringing organisations together for community benefit: “For the health
services and other providers as part of the co-op, it might just actually
make a difference and be a way we can all collectively advocate for a more
interconnected service system. We know at the moment there’s a lot of
wasted time and effort and money for the service providers, but also the
clients who just get shunted from one place to another” (homelessness
service).

Building Capability Generating data capability for individuals, organ-

isations and the community was mentioned by most participants: “It’s
actually growing some capacity in our region to use data together” (wom-
en’s health service); “So our organisation would have capacity in terms of
well, how to design data sets for instance, so that they are analysable”
(homelessness service).

By the end of the project, partner participants reported feeling more

confident and empowered about using data. While they noted insights
gained about their community from data analyses, their main reflections
were about gains in data capability and collaborative relationships.
56 J. Farmer et al.

Insights About Community Participants noted their preconceptions

about more-or-less resilient suburbs were not all borne out when actual
datasets were analysed. For one suburb not previously identified as hav-
ing challenges, data analyses showed consistent deficits, when compared
with other suburbs, on multiple resilience indicators. Another suburb
perceived as wealthy was suggested—via data analysis—as vulnerable
regarding social isolation. Participants noted this made them want to find
out more about what was happening in these suburbs, that is, to get some
ground-truthing for verification of the information suggested by the data
analyses.

Capability Built All participants discussed increases in aspects of data

capability. One participant highlighted appreciation of governance mat-
ters for using and sharing data, while another had started working with
her organisation’s data specialist and was working more with data herself.
One participant, a data manager at a health organisation, noted the
project had made him question his organisation’s reluctance to share
data: “I’ve come to question some really tired governance structures.
Maybe it’s done because we don’t understand what’s being asked, but
really, it’s about avoiding the risk. I don’t have a solution, but it’s become
quite obvious” (health service commissioning organisation).
Participants discussed strategies developed to deal with data sharing
challenges. For example, making indices to show relative levels of indica-
tors across different suburbs. The power of sophisticated visual displays
was highlighted: “I found it really riveting the first time you guys showed
those maps… it was just—I loved it” (community health service No. 2);
and “Service managers are often quite visually driven, so it’s quite power-
ful in that sense, the power of the data seeing it displayed” (health service
commissioning organisation).

Connecting with Data The project helped to build relationships and

understanding between organisations. One said: “I guess I’ve become
more aware of the value of the process, perhaps even more so than the
value of the outcome” (Council). Talking about and with data was
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 57

suggested as useful for building knowledge about each other’s work

through data. Bank participants said they had increased understanding of
­community challenges and they were able to introduce this knowledge
into other discussions within the bank.

Outcomes and Lessons Learned

Overall, the project was well received, with participants more enthused at
the end than at the start! Participants worked their way through data
challenges as they arose, finding workable solutions. For example, using
an index when working with potentially sensitive data to avoid any risk
of identifiability. On this topic, participants were primarily concerned
about reputational risk for their organisation if someone used analysed
data out of context as, in all other respects, they were sure they were re-­
using data safely and ethically.
Contrary to advice to start with an identified question (The GovLab,
2022), partners in this project benefited from a period of exploring
data with each other. At the start, each had their own interests and did
not know the work of other organisations. Significantly, they also did
not know what data might be forthcoming from their own organisa-
tions. The project was a journey of discovery in many ways and, at the
end, participants were more knowledgeable and confident to agree
next steps of work with data as individual organisations and
collaboratively.
While the project started with organisations focused on getting new
insights from data, from around half-way through the project, partners
agreed a different significant outcome was forthcoming. This was build-
ing mutual knowledge through exploring data together that enabled
them to see what each could contribute to collective change at commu-
nity level. Further, they felt empowered to use data in their own work and
could see where it might support work of the organisation because they
could now understand their operations and services through a lens of
data. Some commented they had started to work more confidently on
58 J. Farmer et al.

data governance issues. For example, the homelessness service identified

gaps in data due to incomplete collection. Managers said they would use
new data visualisations to illustrate to staff the benefit of collecting com-
plete datasets.
Data sharing remains problematical. One health organisation simply
did not provide data because of perceived challenges of sharing. The data
manager explained it was too difficult and time-consuming to navigate
the necessary processes—potentially impossible, he thought. Most
encouraging was that some managed to navigate data sharing, helping to
generate novel analyses that gave new perspectives about the community.
To read more on the City of Greater Bendigo Data Collaborative see
Farmer et al. (2022) and https://datacoop.com.au/bendigo/.

Summary
Above we have provided three case studies of data projects from our
research and working with partners. While each is different, they all
involve collaboration between people and/or organisations with different
expertise and perspectives. Similarly, in common, the cases each re-used
different datasets and targeted different insights.
Each of the cases provides evidence of learning and changes in relation
to using data among staff of the participating organisations. We under-
stand this as influencing aspects of the data capability of the organisations
that participated. With Case Studies 2 and 3, we were able to evidence
changes through before and after the project interview data collected.
With Case Study 1, the government Business Insights Unit was able to
extend its range of types of analyses to inform policy once it learned new
techniques of using social media data and found new data sources. In
Case Study 2, each organisation’s participants expressed surprise that
their routine datasets could be repurposed to address real operational and
impact measurement challenges. Case Study 3 yielded several examples
of changes in awareness, with a participant of one organisation talking
about using data much more in her own work and most of the
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 59

participants remarked on their increasing and more confident interac-

tions with their data staff and teams due to their practical and applied
learning from the data collaborative project.
The datasets and analysis techniques varied. While Case Study 1 used
innovative Natural Language Processing techniques and public ‘big data’,
linking disparate existing datasets and geospatial analysis was more
important for Case Studies 2 and 3. Common to each case was a collab-
orative process of data discovery, repurposing, linking and sense-making.
That is, each case shows the significance of identifying and exploring
existing datasets and considering how they can be re-used and linked
with open and public data. Equally important is the process of data visu-
alisation and, in each case, this enabled processes of collaborative sense-­
making with the data.
In terms of collaboration, Case Study 1 involved participants from dif-
ferent departments and agencies of government involved in generating,
implementing and evaluating policy, but also staff of the Business Insights
Unit who were already engaged in aspects of data analysis. In Case Study
2, the participants brought together around projects were from across
departments within each of the non-profit organisations. These staff
tended to note that they generally work in isolated departmental silos.
The data project brought them together to discuss how their work inter-
connects, driven by working with data. In Case Study 3, the collabora-
tion was among different organisations working in the same community.
Interestingly, for each of these different types of collaborations, we noted
the same set of emergent phenomena or benefits. Participants got to
know and understand each other’s work partly through the purposeful
action of the process, but also by discussing and probing data generated
by the work of different participants at the table (or on the Zoom call).
Further, new relationships were forged that could lead to more efficient
and effective, and certainly better-informed, future working together. As
a participant in Case Study 3 noted, she came to understand “the value of
the process even more so than the outcome”.
Each case raised barriers and challenges that simultaneously helped to
ground participants’ expectations about the potential of data analytics,
but also sent them back to their organisations to question practices or to
60 J. Farmer et al.

make change. For example, in Case Study 3, the homelessness organisa-

tion wanted to improve the completeness of its data, and the healthcare
commission organisation participant wanted to explore governance prac-
tices that served to keep health data hidden. In Case Study 1, participants
came to understand the value of aligning the outcomes measurement
framework with likely available data from the start, rather than trying to
tack things together after policy implementation. All participants came
to understand the challenges of sharing data between collaborating part-
ner organisations.

Key Takeaways from This Chapter

In this chapter, we jumped straight into some case studies of non-profits
and data analytics. This was done to ensure that readers know what kind
of work we are talking about and to illustrate the range of possibilities for
types of datasets to work with, visualisations and participants. Key points
to take away from this chapter are listed below.

Key Takeaways

• Small, experimental projects that address real-life challenges provide a

‘toe in the water’ for staff of non-profits and others to test the value
that data analytics could have for them.
• Collaborating on projects led to building relationships across depart-
ments and organisations that resulted in better informed data products
and to wider understanding among novel networks of people.
• Work on the projects led to increases in knowledge, awareness and com-
fort in working with data among participants. We suggest this led to
some building of data capability and also to understanding what their
organisations need if they are to work more effectively with their data.

Undertaking the case study projects in this chapter with diverse organ-
isational partners led to our conceptualisation of data capability and
appreciating the benefits of collaborative working that are explored in
Chap. 3.
 2 Case Studies of Data Projects 61

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons
licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.
 3
Data Capability Through Collaborative
Data Action

In Chap. 2, we presented case studies of some of our data projects that

involved working with non-profits and other types of organisations and
re-using varied datasets. Each of these projects saw participants move
from curiosity about data analytics, to a growth in confidence around
using terminology, understanding techniques and having a grasp of non-­
profits’ internal data resources. We argue that this represents the partici-
pants making progress in building aspects of the data capability of their
organisations as well as understanding gaps. From our experience, suc-
cessful results happen in data projects when people with diverse back-
grounds and perspectives collaborate to explore issues of direct relevance
to them, drawing on varied expertise, infrastructure and datasets.
Organisations have existing data practices and resources, and so experi-
menting together with novel analytical techniques and types of datasets
can help partners with a social mission to understand what to do next to
extend and tailor their future data practices.
What we found through our projects with non-profits, then, is that
collaborative data action supports the building of data capability. As
depicted in our case studies, collaborations can draw across teams within
a single organisation, across a set of like-minded organisation partners

© The Author(s) 2023 63

J. Farmer et al., Data for Social Good, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5554-9_3
64 J. Farmer et al.

and externally with researcher partners and others. In this chapter, we

move from examples showing the sometimes messy business of non-prof-
its working with novel datasets, to attempting to secure some concepts
and processes that underpin non-profits working with data analytics.
Thus, we explore here what we think data capability looks like for non-
profits and provide our methodology for supporting capability to build
through collaborative data action. In doing so, we suggest priority topics
for non-profits to address, principally around establishing responsible
data governance and being clear about ethics and consent.
Again, we note this is based on our practical work up to 2022, and
from our base in Australia. Law and practices relevant to non-profit data
analytics will be different in other countries and regions and are changing
over time.

Understanding Data Capability

Drawing on our own research, we suggest that at an organisational level,
data capability is a holistic resource. It involves having in place the
interconnected aspects of appropriate staff roles and skills, technologies,
and data management practices and processes to fulfil what an organisation
needs and wants to do with data. In data science, capability has a dual
meaning, relating both to human competencies and technical components
like software, hardware and database systems. In our work, we retain this
sense of data capability as multi-faceted and interconnected with multiple
technical and human attributes. Data capability is additionally hard to
pin down, we suggest, because it is situated or adaptive to context—that
is, data capability will vary according with each non-profit’s work, mission
and vision in their operating context. We realise this can make data
capability seem elusive and hard to measure, but we suggest it is most
realistic to think of it as this combined, evolving, overall resource.
Data capability is related to data management and data governance.
Data management is about having a system of internal practices and
mechanisms for controlling data within an organisation. DAMA
International describe centralised, distributed and hybrid models of data
management, referring to the way parts of an organisation can work
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 65

collectively and independently when managing and working with data

(2017, p. 565). Data governance is the framework of ethics, safety and
accountability practices that interweaves with and shapes how data
management is done. We return to explore data governance as a
foundation for data capability later in this chapter.
We suggest data capability is the outcome that non-profits should be
aspiring to achieve as they increasingly use data analytics. However, it is
not static, rather it is refreshed and continually reformed via processes of
engaging with datasets and new ways of working with, and using, data.
This means the data capability of an organisation formulates through
adaptation and change via ongoing experimenting and learning with
data. Considering our Chap. 2 case study projects as processes of learning,
participants were generally more knowledgeable, confident and
comfortable with using data and interpreting data analyses by the end of
projects. While we did not have formal evaluation in all our projects, we
witnessed instances of increased engagement with data among a wide
range of staff members (not just data or IT professionals) and the adoption
of more sophisticated data practices, often across teams and individuals
who didn’t normally work together. Participants developed agility and
confidence in their ability to determine when and which types of data
analytics and visualisations would be useful (or not) in specific contexts.
They were generally more excited and animated about the potential of
working with data into the future. Underpinning these findings,
participants also talked about changes that would need to be made,
particularly to their data management and data governance practices.
Examples of this include questioning risk aversion in sharing datasets and
talking about the need for strategic consideration of reconfiguring data
governance. These are all aspects indicating the way data capability forms
and provide examples of the multiple and small steps by which data
capability develops in relation to context.
In our projects, we saw non-profits’ data capability influenced through
processes of practising with using their own internal datasets for insights
about their problems and challenges. This seemed impactful, compared
with participating in generic training modules or engaging with generic
resource kits (as we tried in Case 2 described in Chap. 2). While building
data capability still implies financial investment in technologies,
66 J. Farmer et al.

infrastructures and skilled people, collaborative practice can help

participants work out what their organisation needs and target their
spending on priorities. Depending on who is involved in collaborative
projects, progress in data capability can be activated strategically (from
the top down) where senior managers participate, or from the ground up,
through the action of practitioners in consumer and client-facing roles.
Responding to sectoral interest in increasing data analytics expertise
across the non-profit sector, several frameworks have emerged for
measuring and monitoring development of organisational resources
related to having data capability (for example, see the work of https://
data.org in the US). Some stakeholders—such as philanthropic
foundations or non-profit representative bodies—seek to benchmark
how individual non-profits compare in their data maturity against others
in the sector. They also apply frameworks to identify sectoral strengths
and gaps. Some assessment tools have rating scales, for example, with a
low score for initial or ad hoc practices, to a higher score for systematically
managed or optimised data practices (see, e.g., DAMA International’s
rating scale [DAMA International, 2017, p. 531]). In the UK, Data
Orchard’s Framework for Measuring Data Maturity in non-profit
organisations (Data Orchard, 2019) aims for expert-level resources and
practices or mastery as the goal, with maturity examined on dimensions
including data uses, analysis, leadership, culture, tools and skills. We
explored the difference we see between data capability and data maturity
or data literacy in Chap. 1, saying why we prefer the idea of data capability
as a goal for non-profits. This is mainly because we do not think data
resources like human skills, technologies and practices should be fixed,
but rather adaptive relative to each non-profit’s context, strategy, mission,
size and so on.
While we express reservations with static frameworks, one of our own
collaborative research projects driven by perspectives from multiple
Australian non-profits led to the creation of a broad data capability
framework (Yao et al., 2021). This identifies attributes participating non-­
profits considered central to their data work. These are assigned to four
domains: (1) access to quality data; (2) data skills and ability; (3) effective
technology systems, tools and data infrastructure; and (4) responsible data
governance (see Yao et al., 2021). However, even given this framework, we
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 67

have found more generally in our work with non-profits that rather than
embracing levels of attainment on a fixed scale, many emphasise they
have nuanced and varying needs and goals for data use. Consequently,
the value of frameworks, for them, was suggested as offering shorthand
checklists against which to reflect on organisational strengths and gaps
against an indicative industry standard.
Building the more holistic resource of data capability also enables non-­
profits to influence and activate beyond their own operational matters.
For larger organisations, this could involve sharing data expertise with
other, smaller organisations and helping to develop sector-wide collective
responses to social problems. Alternatively, it could involve developing
shared data resources or data collaboratives like the Humanitarian Data
Exchange (HDX) (https://data.humdata.org/). Having data capability
provides a foundation for a non-profit to partner with their clients and
communities on data projects with wide social benefit. Hendey et al.
(2020) depict this as non-profits contributing to a wider social mission of
enabling community data capability. While no single model of community
data capability exists, the authors argue that when data capability and
resources are democratised and available to those who can benefit,
“communities will be better equipped to partner with foundations, apply
data to understand issues, and take the actions needed to achieve the
ambitious outcomes that [philanthropic] foundations seek” (Hendey
et al., 2020, p. 1). Non-profits are well placed, due to their work and
missions, to drive community data capability goals.

A Collaborative Data Action Methodology

Our case studies in Chap. 2 show where we have worked in collaborations
with non-profits, sometimes with staff members across teams of one organ-
isation and sometimes across organisations. In those projects, we observed
teams and groups addressing a data challenge, but also in the process, devel-
oping or at least influencing their data capability. Some of the impacts of
working collaboratively are highlighted at the end of Chap. 2. Observing
the projects, their direct outcomes and wider impressive impacts has made
68 J. Farmer et al.

us committed to collaborative working; and in this section, we talk specifi-

cally about our collaborative data action methodology.
There could be a range of different ways that non-profits could gain
data capability through collaborative working. This could be through
working with other non-profits with large or specialist data science teams,
working more effectively across teams within their own organisations, or
accessing data collaboratives or external data for social good initiatives (see
this book’s appendix). The point is to engage with others with a shared
social mission and to gather a team of people that combines useful
knowledge, skills and perspectives.
There are some very practical implications of collaborating that we
have already alluded to. These include accessing others’ expertise and
resources to help improve your own organisation’s access to costly
resources and to learn what you need by efficient contextualised learning.
There are also wider benefits of collaborating. Firstly, the field of data
analytics is moving so fast at present that it requires dedicated specialists
to keep up. This is just data science, of course, and the fields of social
justice and addressing a social mission have also changed dramatically in
response to the pandemic and its ongoing effects. A simple benefit of
collaborating is that it gives access to a wider range of human resources to
keep up with changes in knowledge and techniques across fields of
expertise and practice. Collaborating is also a way to help keep small,
potentially niche non-profits operating as the sector becomes more
corporate and favours larger organisations. Finally, and importantly,
organisations collaborating with data for social good help to build the
field. Working together generates new networks, social capital and
communities of practice between organisations that will impact more
widely to foster community data capability.
In our projects, we use a process of collective ‘learning by doing’ or
collaborative data action. The process allows for experimentation and
adaptation. It allows individuals within non-profits, including senior
managers and board members, to see how working with data can help to
integrate their operations and services across departments (i.e., wider
benefits). And it can help to empower and activate grass-roots practitioners
in incorporating data work as part of their daily practice.
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 69

While data projects will vary in their precise process due to different
participants, questions, data and timelines, we have found there are a
consistent set of main activities that punctuate collaborative data action
in our data projects with non-profits. Figure 3.1 outlines these main
activities, giving an approximate chronology.
At this point, we highlight that we have mainly used the collaborative
data action methodology when working with organisations seeking to
find out whether data analytics is useful for them. This could suggest it
works best for those setting out from a low base; however, that is not the
whole story. For example, the bank in Case Study 3 had a large and
sophisticated data analytics team, and in Case Study 1, we worked with
the business insights unit of government, a team specialised in data
analytics to inform policy. Rather, then, perhaps the collaborative data
action methodology is best regarded as a mechanism for experimenting
with data analytics. Experimenting can involve starting out, but it can
also involve trialling different techniques for data analysis or addressing

Fig. 3.1 Process of collaborative data action for non-profits’ data projects
70 J. Farmer et al.

more ambitious goals. Thus, collaborative data action can involve organ-
isations that are skilled-up and advanced in working with data. Of course,
a key element here is that an organisation can access a range of knowl-
edge, technology or other resources that can help to work with data in
different ways or inject other types of knowledge (e.g., from social science
or community practice) into data analytics.
In our projects, we tried out various activities as part of processes of
experimenting and collaborating in data projects. Some approaches we
initially included turned out to be blind alleys—for example, the general
educational webinars we provided in Case Study 2 turned out to be less
well-received than learning by doing experienced with participants in
addressing their organisations’ challenges and using their data. Ultimately,
we arrived at a methodology comprising a relatively consistent set of
activities that helped to produce project outputs and processes and within
which participants said they experienced learning and enjoyment.
Steps in our collaborative data action methodology involve different
kinds of actions (see Table 3.1). Some steps involve exploring. Step 1, for
example, is about simultaneously exploring ideas from previous case
studies, questions to focus on, and useful datasets all in order to test the
feasibility of undertaking a data project and deciding its initial scope.
Step 2 involves turning to specialist experts examples, and precedent
for help to formally get started. If a project is being undertaken internally
and involves just one organisation, then a data protocol should be drawn
up establishing what is to be done with data and why. If a project involves
collaborating and sharing data across organisations, then data sharing
agreements will be required that allow partners to work together with
internal datasets. Data sharing is notoriously complex and requires engag-
ing with legal principles influenced by the laws and guidance that apply
in different geographical jurisdictions. Individual organisations will also
have their own protocols and require compliance with sectoral guidance.
We have indicated some current resources that can help to think about
data sharing and what is required in data sharing agreements in the appen-
dix. Data sharing across organisations is also revisited later in this chapter.
In our projects we also found that it was useful to build in some formal
stocktake or evaluation ‘before and after’ opportunities to facilitate
reflection at the start and end of data projects. This enables participants
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 71

Table 3.1 Steps in the process of collaborative data action for non-profits’ data
projects
Step Actions Goal/achievement
Early steps
1. EXPLORE initial Consider what topics or questions Draft early scope
question or focus, the data project might target of a project,
potential data sources and what internal and open including
and similar data datasets there might be that questions,
projects could address the question. datasets and
Explore examples of other data collaborators
projects and their output across teams
visualisations and engage with and/or other
potential data collaborators organisations
with a shared interest and
useful skills
2. Bring in SPECIALIST Work with a legal team and data Have agreed data
HELP for establishing collaborators to establish data protocol and/or
data protocols or protocols and, if needed, data data sharing
agreements sharing agreements matching agreements
jurisdiction/sector legal
requirements
3. Pre-project data Conduct an early ‘stocktake’ to Summary of data
capability STOCKTAKE establish all participants’ goals, capability at the
data challenges and gaps in start
capability
Doing the project
4. ITERATE through Begin initial data analysis using Identify insights
cycles of analysing & identified data sources and and
visualising datasets, generate visualisations to discuss visualisations to
using DATA WALKS to findings as a group. Then repeat address focus
EXPLORE and then this process until a focused questions
analysing other question has been addressed or
datasets and/or insights gained, that is, until the
ADAPTING group is sufficiently satisfied
visualisations and they have attained their goals in
questions the data project
End of project
5. End of project data Conduct follow-up stocktake to Summary of
capability STOCKTAKE find out what has changed, any changes in data
learning and remaining gaps capability
6. NEXT STEPS Think about what has been Acknowledge
learned and what should be outcomes of the
done next data project and
agree next steps
72 J. Farmer et al.

to identify changes in their attitudes and practices at individual and

organisational levels. This stocktake can be simple and involve thinking
about and documenting concerns about data, aspirations for using data
and assessments of expertise and readiness. At the end of projects, it can
be about what was learned and what remain gaps. Stocktakes are at steps
3 and 5 of our methodology. We did not include formal data gathering
stocktakes in our early projects (e.g., Case Study 1), but we discovered its
value in Case Study 2 and then applied this learning in Case Study 3 and
other projects since.
Step 4 involves iteration of several activities of working with datasets,
aiming to answer questions and point to next steps. It involves analysing
and visualising data and then exploring and discussing results. Once
analyses and visualisations have been explored, it is usually necessary to
cycle back a few times to identify other useful datasets and analyse and
visualise these—all with the target of getting closer to an ‘answer’ to
questions set or topics to be explored via the data analyses and to find out
more about the topic(s) involved in exploring a question.
In our projects we employed cycles of workshops using an approach
inspired by the data walks method of the Urban Institute’s National
Neighborhood Indicators Partnerships (Murray et al., 2015). Data walks
involve workshop discussion where participants are shown visualised
analyses, and encouraged to ask questions, engage with what they see in
the data and sense-check this given their grass-roots knowledge. Iterative
rounds of data analysis followed by discussion help participants to make
sense of data that has been analysed and visualised and to discuss with
each other, the stories they perceive to be told in the data. Visualisations
are an important part of data walks, as diagrams, geospatial maps and
graphs tend to be commonly accessible to participants from different
backgrounds. In our projects, data walks were useful for considering
topic-based insights but also for stimulating technical queries about
datasets and exploring issues about data collection affecting interpretation
of analyses.
Based on feedback on analysed and visualised data from the workshops,
new datasets may be identified and analysed, new types of analysis might
be conducted with the same datasets or different visualisation techniques
might be employed. Then new analyses and visualisations would be brought
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 73

back for further discussion and sense-making at a workshop, with the idea
being to cycle through multiple workshops until a question or focus topic
has been sufficiently addressed. Open-ended cycles of iteration can be chal-
lenging to explain in funding applications and contracts, so it may be use-
ful to consider that in our projects we found three to four iterative cycles
generally produced useful findings. After more than three to four cycles,
the project might lose impetus and participants might lose interest.
Exploring questions and datasets collaboratively in workshops helps to
generate a shared understanding and language around data use and out-
comes sought. The collaborative methodology ensures that each partici-
pant shares their perspective in these sessions and their take on featured
questions and data. This means that no single department within an
organisation or dominant partner, if working across organisations, imposes
their viewpoint. Taking an exploratory approach can generate wider buy-
in by showing that different participants can have different, equally valid,
ways of understanding a question, problem or challenge being addressed.
Understanding can be gained here about how problems are multi-faceted,
prompted by discussing insights suggested by data analyses.
This working between question(s) and dataset(s) that we describe
involves processes of adaptation, with a goal of matching data with
questions. Sometimes the adaptive process leads to framing a question in
a different way. At other times, there is a realisation that a whole and
perfect dataset to answer a pre-defined question does not exist, prompting
a turn to other data that can inform about a question if not answer it
directly. An example here was where the state government participants in
Case Study 1 came to realise that a comprehensive dataset precisely
aligning with changed attitudes to family violence did not exist. Instead,
we harnessed Twitter data and news media data with textual data analytics
to show a quite granular change in topics discussed over time. At the
same time, we know there are caveats about some of these datasets. For
example, Twitter users are a self-selecting, more policy-aware community.
The government itself periodically conducts a Community Attitudes
Survey covering attitudes to family violence but, again, responses in that
dataset are from self-selected participants who tend to be older and more
educated. Together, the data from the three sources (Twitter, news media,
community survey) can be triangulated to give richer, though still not
74 J. Farmer et al.

comprehensive, information about the extent of discussion (in this case

related to family violence), variety of topics discussed and responses to
different types of policy and other events.
The adaptive way of working between topics and questions that we
adopt is one way that our approach is potentially distinct. Other data
project methodologies we have seen emphasise pursuing and identifying
a precise problem or question before proceeding to data analysis (e.g., The
GovLab, n.d.). While it is important to have a broad initial focus, we
have found it can be difficult for non-profit partners to identify specific
questions or pain points at the start of a data project. This can be because
participants don’t have a grasp of what data might be available, what
might be possible (and not possible) with data analytics and may need
time to understand the work of other participants. In our experience,
focus for projects does happen, but it emerges or sharpens through
working with data and discussing questions iteratively and learning what
is possible and useful. Being open as to focus can be challenging for non-­
profits to justify in funding applications, so a useful strategy is to identify
a broad topic to explore from the start.
Following the end of project stocktake at step 5, the conclusion of the
process is to acknowledge what has been achieved in terms of data product
outputs and wider outcomes in relation to learning or partnerships and
to decide what next steps are appropriate, if any.

Finding Your Data Collaborators

In this book, we propose that building data capability should not be a
solo practice. Building data capability could be done through working on
experimental data projects and these might benefit, depending on their
scope and goals, from the skills and perspectives of a range of different
people, teams and organisations. Preferably, this would also include lived
experience consumers, clients and citizens because they will help to make
more insightful, ethical data products and extend data capability within
the community. In Chap. 2, we showed that the collaborations we have
worked within took multiple forms. They involved working across
departments inside an organisation (as with Good Cycles and Yooralla in
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 75

Case Study 2, and multiple departments and agencies of government in

Case Study 1) and working across non-profits and other community
organisations (as in the City of Greater Bendigo data collaborative project
in Case Study 3). In each case, our university-based social data analytics
team brought expertise in data science and social science, as well as access
to technologies and safe, secure practices. The collaborating partners
brought their expertise which also involved data analytics skills and
understanding of problems and contexts. When we were re-using non-­
profits’ internal datasets, their staff could inform about how data was
collected and what was included and excluded in datasets.
We term the various participants—people, teams, organisations—in
data projects as data collaborators. While a range of perspectives makes
the collaboration more than the sum of its parts, clearly the main thing
we are focused on is the potential offered by injecting advanced know-­
how about data science and analytics. It is a premise of this book that the
projects we describe are about building (greater) data capability for non-­
profits. In our projects, the university team brought access to advanced
data science knowledge, technology and practices. While here we mainly
focus on university teams, there is a range of ways to access collaborating
partners with data science expertise. Non-profits might partner with
other, perhaps larger, non-profits that have specialist data analytics teams
or collaborate together to approach some external entity with expertise.
In the appendix, we suggest some data analytics initiatives that have a
particular mission to build data analytics capability of the non-profit
sector. Initiatives working to support data capability development are
sometimes termed data intermediaries or data institutions (Hardinges &
Keller, 2022). These might offer opportunities for mentoring and learning
in partnerships (Perkmann & Schildt, 2014; Susha et al., 2017), although
some data intermediaries are more engaged as brokers between
organisations and data owners (Sangwan, 2021). In encouraging
collaborations between non-profits and other social sector actors to grow
data capability and community data capability, we align with the concept
of the organisational partners envisaged in the National Neighborhood
Indicators Partnerships. Many of those partnerships combine local
community organisations, non-profits and councils working with
university social data analytics labs (Arena & Hendey, 2019).
76 J. Farmer et al.

As university researchers ourselves, we recognise and suggest the poten-

tial of seeking out a university social data analytics lab to work with. The
opportunity is that such labs will often share the social mission orienta-
tion of non-profits, and there are many examples of labs situated in uni-
versities around the world. Some university data analytics labs will be
actively looking to partner for access to ‘real-life’ projects for training
data science students. As one example, the Center for Urban and Regional
Affairs (CURA) at the University of Minnesota (https://www.cura.umn.
edu) links academics and students with community organisations to
generate data analytics projects, specialising in data for neighbourhood
planning. Other examples of university data labs working with non-­
profits can be found in the literature; for example, Tripp et al. (2020)
describe a partnership between an education and literacy non-profit and
the West Georgia University’s Data and Visualisation Lab. Of course,
generally universities do still require funding to work on data projects.
This could come directly from a non-profit or partnerships could be
formed with university labs to apply, together, for funding.
Different partners collaborating with data and sharing knowledge and
skills generates new boundary spaces (Susha et al., 2017). These enable
novel combined skillsets to emerge, helping to grow a future workforce of
people that understand both non-profit work and data analytics. Research
literature describing how to do data analytics for social good emphasises
the significance of a diverse team, including data scientists, social
scientists, practitioners and lived experience consumers and clients (e.g.,
Williams, 2020).

Responsible Data Governance

In the last part of this chapter, we focus on practices that all non-profits
will already have considered in some way if they are working with data:
these are practices of data governance. Data governance is understood
here as having the systems and processes so that an organisation can
ensure data is managed and analysed responsibly, legally and ethically. It
involves having clear mechanisms through which an organisation, and its
people, are held to account about the production and use of data. We
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 77

focus on data governance here because it is a priority consideration for an

organisation working to re-use its data. Having appropriate data
governance in place is a necessary precursor to working in data projects,
particularly when engaging with other organisations in a collaboration. It
is also a feature that organisations can start working on without having to
wait to find data collaborators to work with.
Having responsible data governance enables an organisation to have
safe and secure data, accountability, quality assurance and ethical data
practice. Active engagement across organisations in data governance will
result in a positive data culture, with all staff, clients, consumers, managers
and board members engaged in well-considered, ethical data work.
Co-ordinated practices of responsible data governance should be
thought through and implemented by any organisation collecting and
using data. Data governance sits around, permeates and directs data
management, including affecting who works with data (roles and skills),
technologies and how they are used, and the nature of practices and
processes in handling, storing and analysing data. Governance will need
to be able to respond to changing organisation requirements to use
different datasets with different types of analyses. Data governance needs
to be integral to organisational governance, not seen as separate, as it
relates to whole of organisation best practice and accountability. With
increased production, storage and use of data, and the consequent
potential for many forms of data harm, data governance has become an
important aspect of organisational governance (Redden et al., 2020).
This includes aligning and interweaving data practices with the protocols
and policies that guide an organisation’s practices around ethics, risk
management, compliance, administration and privacy (Governance
Institute of Australia, 2022).
The significance of data governance makes it a strategic organisational
issue, and the priority data governance is given by organisations will
determine what they can do with data. The values inherent in how data
governance is implemented shapes the goals and outcomes of using data.
This includes ways of viewing relationships—customers and clients can
be ‘mined’, and their data ‘extracted’, or they can be consenting
collaborators, with their needs aligned to how data is used.
Depictions of data governance in the research literature can suggest a
commercial emphasis inappropriate for the non-profit sector. For
78 J. Farmer et al.

example, Otto (2011, p. 47) defines data governance as “a companywide

framework for assigning decision-related rights and duties in order to be
able to adequately handle data as a company asset” (cited in Alhassan
et al., 2018, p. 301). Objectifying data in this way, as a kind of commod-
ity, serves to disregard the integrative relationship between data, people
and services. It might be said, therefore, that non-profit data governance
models compare, but also differ, in ways from those of commercial organ-
isations, with differences driven by mission, context and vision of each
non-profit.
While frameworks for data governance tend to be internally focused, the
requirement for formal policies and protocols is increasingly driven by
interactions with the external environment. This is especially true in rela-
tion to embarking on data collaborations involving other organisations and
sharing datasets (Verhulst, 2021). Indeed, increasingly, experts advocate for
data stewards as a kind of data governance role for organisations serious
about developing data capability (Verhulst et al., 2020). “Data stewardship
is a concept with deep roots in the science and practice of data collection,
sharing, and analysis. Reflecting the values of fair information practice,
data stewardship denotes an approach to the management of data, particu-
larly data that can identify individuals” (Rosenbaum, 2010, p. 1442). Data
stewards would be responsible for understanding the datasets that exist in
organisations and ensuring their quality. One role for organisational data
stewards would be in bringing internal datasets into collaborations across
organisations to facilitate data collaboratives and data sharing.
While designating a data steward signifies organisational acknowledge-
ment that data governance is important and demands an owner, the holis-
tic nature of data governance suggests it as also collective action issue. As
touched on in Chap. 1, clients, customers and other people in the data of
non-profits and involved in its collection, should be included in designing
data governance that assures fairness and empowerment. Some researchers
have demonstrated “the value in theorizing data governance as a collective
action problem and argue for the necessity of ensuring researchers and
practitioners achieve a common understanding of the inherent challenges,
as a first step towards developing data governance solutions that are viable
in practice” (Benfeldt et al., 2020, p. 299).
Topics at the heart of responsible data governance are ethics and con-
sent and are featured below. Clarity about ethics and relationships of
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 79

consent and trust is essential because of the imperative of accountability

to all of the people who are stakeholders in the data. Getting ethics and
consent right sets non-profits up to achieve in more ambitious, innovative
and strategic efforts of working with data beyond basic use of internal
datasets—that is, looking to data collaboratives and data sharing.
Data culture is closely related to data governance. When data gover-
nance is working well, it becomes embedded and part of the everyday
practice of organisations, contributing to a positive data culture. Clearly
data culture can be of varying quality, dependent on attributes such as
inclusion in governance, ethics-orientation and embeddedness in roles,
operations and strategy. We understand data culture here as the organisa-
tionally embedded ways of understanding and working with data ethi-
cally and safely. Central to having a positive data culture is instilling and
embedding genuine concern about the relationship between the people
who generate the data (bearing in mind Williams’ assertion that “data are
people” [Williams, 2020, p. 220]) and what can thus be done with data.
Disciplined thinking about consent and trust must be established and
maintained. Data culture relates to the values of organisations around
enabling and empowering people (staff, clients, customers and others)
and accountability to these stakeholders. While we found little written
about organisational data culture and its development, it seems an issue
that is close to consideration of organisational ethics.

Data Ethics and Consent

Issues of ethics and consent are fundamental to consider from the start of
any data collection. They are difficult to ‘retrofit’ if a non-profit decides it
wants to re-use data originally collected to measure outputs or for
statutory reporting. Clearly as well, addressing these issues is not about
organising so that a non-profit can have the data it wants to work with.
The question of who owns the data, and is in the data, is the ethical issue
here. As highlighted in Chap. 1, work is ongoing internationally to
partner with people who are (in) data to drive its ethical collection and
use. Indigenous scholars have perhaps gone furthest in showing why and
how marginalised groups should be driving collection and use of data
about them. For example, Kukutai and Taylor (2016) documented the
80 J. Farmer et al.

importance of affirming Indigenous people’s rights to self-determination

via recognition of data sovereignty.
Some practical guidance and resources to help non-profits achieve
ethical data use and re-use have been developed by data initiatives inter-
nationally (e.g., National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, 2018;
NESTA, 2022; and see the appendix). In our own work in collaborations
with non-profits, we have found that some materials about ethics and
consent can be high-level, too general or too specific in their nature for
application across diverse contexts. As a body of advice, the sheer amount
of guidance can even seem overwhelming. Perhaps because of this, among
the communities of data practice where we have participated, non-profits
tend to share and adapt data management, privacy and security policies
among their networks and to develop norms around data collection and
use through cumulative processes. Data ethics is not always explicitly
discussed, even if care and responsibility is taken in all data practices.
Here, we suggest how to begin to think about and apply data ethics, irre-
spective of precise frameworks or protocols, by focusing on establishing
relationships of care and consent in data production and use.
Firstly, there are legal considerations in using personal data and data
governance is entwined with regulation and increasingly the subject of
law reform across different global jurisdictions. Laws governing personal
data have dealt mainly with issues of privacy and cybersecurity but are
becoming more complicated as technology develops and services become
‘digital-first’. Because these are jurisdiction-specific, all we can suggest
here is to consult jurisdictional sector representative bodies and the
government agencies established to guide and inform adherence to
relevant laws. If working with sensitive data—for example, personal data,
especially where it concerns health, race, sexuality, beliefs and
associations—data ethics and data management practices (like secure or
encrypted storage, de-identification and access protocols) are high
priority. Non-profits should consider working with a legal advisor with
relevant understanding of data, information and privacy regulation.
Beyond compliance with relevant data regulation, there is growing rec-
ognition of the need to begin with ethical frameworks and develop policies
and practices for data use that involve carefully established trust and con-
sent. By consent we do not simply mean the kinds of contractual
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 81

agreement documents or pages that people sign or click ‘OK’ to engage

with a service. These are instruments for establishing consent, but we are
referring more broadly to the relationships developed within an organisa-
tion and with customers, clients and citizens around data collection and use.
Gaining consent for data use is a process for ensuring good data prac-
tices and relationships. It does not happen just once but is maintained
and re-established as part of managing client and customer relationships
and ensuring informed agreement with any new use of data. This is often
approached through the establishment of norms (based on an organisa-
tions’ values) of what an organisation should do to work safely with per-
sonal data, and with care. Two useful guiding principles are that any data
collected should be necessary, and the purpose should be transparent and
communicated clearly to those involved in generating the data or to
whom it refers. This requires deciding what data is to be collected and its
purpose, and an organisation may have detailed policy documents and
ethical frameworks to help guide those decisions. As raised in Chap. 1,
non-profits should be working towards involving consumers or clients
(i.e., often the subjects in and of non-profits internal datasets), in code-
signing these practices, avoiding tokenistic forms of inclusion.
As part of data governance, a comprehensive set of data ethics protocols
and policies can help to drive a positive organisational data culture. With
data collection increasing, data ethics scholars have identified core con-
cerns to be addressed. Mittelstadt and Floridi (2016) emphasise informed
consent, privacy (including data anonymisation and data protection),
ownership and control over data, epistemology and objectivity (or data
quality), and data-driven inequality “between those who have or lack the
necessary resources to analyse increasingly large datasets” (Mittelstadt &
Floridi, 2016, p. 303). Franzke et al. (2021) describe the development of
a Data Ethics Decision Aid (DEDA), used to reflect on and guide deci-
sions about data projects in the governmental context. The Open Data
Institute’s (2019) Data Ethics Canvas identifies 14 categories to help assess
ethical aspects of using data in an organisational or government context.
There are increasing moves for organisations to collaborate to share re-
used data generated through their work. Our City of Greater Bendigo
data collaborative (see Case Study 3 in Chap. 2), for example, was
developed because seven community organisations wanted to find out
82 J. Farmer et al.

whether pooling their data could help to generate new insights about
community resilience. There are important ethical dimensions to such
data re-use in the context of data sharing. There are logistical aspects to
data sharing—why do it, what data and for what kinds of analysis? But
data sharing and re-use are underpinned by governance and ethical issues
first, because data use is contingent on the arrangements in place to
ensure data is treated ethically, safely and with care. Foremost is clarity
about whether consent for different types of use has been established or
needs to be (re-)established with those who are the subjects of the data.
Consent might have been established for a primary purpose but not for a
secondary purpose. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) laws restrict data re-use and suggest re-establishing consent for
secondary use (European Parliament and the Council of the European
Union, 2016). In that jurisdiction, data can be re-used for a secondary
purpose if its use relates to the primary purpose and a person would
reasonably expect it to be used for the secondary purpose. For health
information or other sensitive information, re-use is contingent on a
direct link with the primary purpose for data collection.
Ensuring that ethics and consent issues are well considered, clear and
codified, and comply with jurisdictional data legislation and practice is
significant to guiding a non-profit’s internal use of data. This becomes
crucial when starting to work with other organisations to re-use data in
collaborations. Ethics and consent practice govern the extent to which
analyses of a non-profit’s internal data can be undertaken, shown or
shared with other organisations. While this might sound straightforward,
consider what is potentially hidden in that deceptively simple idea of
showing or sharing. In our City of Greater Bendigo Case Study 3 (see
Chap. 2), it was one thing to look at each organisations’ visualised data
analyses in a workshop of seven organisations’ representatives, but we
then had to work out whether the visualisations could be seen by other
staff or even explored in wider community engagement exercises. If
visualised analyses of data could be shared, then in what formats? For
example, ultimately percentages at suburb level were converted into an
index of high to low relative quantities (e.g., in relation to wealth or
demand for types of services) in our visualisations. This meant these
could be shared beyond immediate workshop participants. This decision
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 83

was taken on the basis of adhering to consents given/obtained for each

dataset. The decision also responded to perceived potential reputational
risks where community members might react adversely to seeing
visualisations of datasets, for example, bank or service demand data, even
if completely unidentifiable to individuals or households.

Data Sharing for Collective Gain

Given the issues just raised about data sharing in the example of Case
Study 3, finally in this chapter we focus specifically on the data governance
issue of consent and secondary use of datasets and data sharing. Because
an organisation might want to move beyond re-using their own internal
data and collaborate with others around data, obtaining appropriate
consent is fundamental to data collection. A broad framework of thinking
that we have used to guide our projects is the Five Safes model, initially
developed by the UK Data Service (2017) to enable researchers to access
government and sensitive data. This model was later adopted by the
Australian Office of the National Data Commissioner as principles for
access to and re-use of public sector data while maintaining data privacy
and security. Though developed for public data sharing, the principles of
the Five Safes are equally applicable as a guide to safe data sharing in the
non-profit sector. It helps as a high-level framework to evaluate major risk
areas and to identify steps to minimise the risk of data re-use. The Five
Safes model draws attention to issues of sharing data in the domains of:

• Projects: ensuring data is shared for an appropriate purpose that deliv-

ers a public benefit.
• People: ensuring those using the data have the appropriate authority to
access it.
• Settings: ensuring the environment in which the data is shared mini-
mises the risk of unauthorised use or disclosure.
• Data: ensuring appropriate and proportionate protections are applied
to the data.
• Output: ensuring output from the data-sharing arrangement is appro-
priately safeguarded before any further sharing or release.
84 J. Farmer et al.

Data collaboratives have become more widely discussed, as organisa-

tions recognise the value of working together to address community chal-
lenges. In our case studies, we showed an example of a community data
collaborative where a range of organisations united around their internal
datasets to explore for insights about community resilience. Our data
collaborative projects use our Data Co-op platform (https://datacoop.
com.au) that has software, hardware, management practices, multi-­
disciplinary skills and data governance to support safe data sharing.
Funded to the tune of over AU$1,000,000 by the Australian Research
Council and five universities, this scale of investment in data collaborative
infrastructure is outside the scope of most non-profits. We propose this
supports our suggestions above that non-profits seeking to develop more
ambitious data analytics projects could usefully collaborate to achieve
more ambitious and complex projects.
Data collaborations can have various forms and work together for dif-
ferent reasons (Susha et al., 2017). Verhulst and Sangokoya (2015) give
an example of humanitarian organisations working to share data for
disaster relief. NCEL, Nepal’s largest mobile operator, shared anonymised
mobile phone data with the non-profit Swedish organisation Flowminder.
With this data, Flowminder mapped where and how people moved in the
wake of the disaster and shared this information with the government
and UN agencies to assist their relief efforts. The Data Collaborative
between NCEL and Flowminder allowed humanitarian organisations to
better target aid to affected communities—saving many lives. While
there is great potential and promise for data sharing, Verhulst (2021)
highlighted that collaborating with data is one of the main challenges
that (big) data initiatives for public good currently face.
As part of the appendix, we highlight some examples of resources and
tools about data sharing that could be used by non-profits to find more
information and examples, including example data sharing agreements.

Key Takeaways from This Chapter

In this chapter, we aimed to move beyond a rationale for non-profits get-
ting involved in data analytics (Chap. 1) and illustrating how this can be
done (Chap. 2). We explored data capability, a collaborative data action
 3 Data Capability Through Collaborative Data Action 85

methodology, data governance, ethics and consent. The key points to

take away from this chapter are presented below.

Key Takeaways

• Data capability for non-profits is a holistic resource that involves intercon-

nected aspects of appropriate staff roles and skills, technologies and data
management practices and processes that match needs, mission and strat-
egy. It isn’t static because it changes in relation to context, work and goals.
• Collaborating in data projects (collaborative data action) is a way to
build data capability and to learn what is needed to achieve data
capability. It is useful because it targets real challenges of participating
organisations or departments and brings together varied expertise and
different perspectives on challenges.
• Putting in place a sound data governance system is vital for managing
data responsibly, legally and ethically and underpins a shared
organisational data culture. More than a set of processes, it involves
strategic thinking about relationships between a non-profit and its
consumers, clients, customers and communities.
• Laws governing consent and access to data in jurisdictions are significant
to working ethically. Alongside this, formulating consent and data
sharing processes ideally involves co-design, including with people
represented in the data.

The next and last chapter reflects on overall learnings, gives practical
advice about starting or proceeding, and looks to the future and its
challenges and possibilities.

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 4
Activating for a Data-Capable Future

So far in this book, we have argued for non-profits building their capability
for working with data. We have presented a range of small, practical data
projects with non-profits undertaken through our research in 2017–2022.
These supported participating non-profits to build aspects of their data
capability by helping leaders and staff to consider the skills, technologies
and management practices that would be needed to match their different
missions and contexts. We used a collaborative data action methodology
that draws on diverse skills and experiences within and across organisa-
tions, enabling people to learn in practical situations. Projects generated
new insights about social challenges, communities and the value of inter-
nal organisational data. This made collaborating with data a journey of
surprises and creativity as well as a journey of learning.
In this final chapter, we return to our initial idea of giving a rationale
for data capability in the non-profit sector, suggesting benefits and stages.
In the middle, we give some activities to ‘take to your manager’ to get
started, and thereafter to move beyond an initial data project. We also
suggest some strategic actions at organisation, sector and funder levels
that would help to make data analytics part of a new ‘business as usual’.
The latter part looks to the future and considers how emergent data
initiatives could address current challenges, drawing on some illustrative

© The Author(s) 2023 89

J. Farmer et al., Data for Social Good, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5554-9_4
90 J. Farmer et al.

examples. We conclude by reflecting on our learnings from the research

and suggest areas for further studies. The content seeks to stimulate but
also to reassure. We think achieving high-quality data analytics work
targeted at social good is a viable prospect for non-profits; but more than
that, we propose it is an essential underpinning for a bright future.

 ectoral Benefits of Non-profits

S
with Data Capability
Throughout this book, we have made various claims for benefits at the
micro- (individual organisation) through to the macro-scale (community,
society and sectoral structures) for non-profits building data capability. In
this chapter, though, one of our aims is to provide practical material to
‘take to your manager’ or board. As a first step, we summarise three
reasons why non-profits should invest in building data capability: to
up-skill for increased organisational competence; to build a more resilient,
interconnected non-profit ‘field’; and to enable new forms of social justice
activism.

Data Capability and Organisational Competence

Let’s first check-in on the contention that data capability is a key building
block for non-profit organisational competence and agility in the current
global environment. Sian Baker, co-Chief Executive of Data Orchard, a
UK-based social business, recently stated that many of her consultancy’s
clients reported that having internal data capability was an essential
enabler of their response during the COVID pandemic (Vaux, 2021).
For example, UK-based housing service EMH Group was able to rapidly
identify their tenants most in need of welfare checks, thanks to a recently
enhanced internal database, and the Herefordshire Food Poverty Alliance
(UK) used the findings of a 2019 food security risk audit to rapidly
provide support to clients in 2020. More widely, there is increasing
recognition that government and non-profits need to be able to effectively
manage data in order to respond to ongoing social disruptions and
 4 Activating for a Data-Capable Future 91

disasters caused by public health challenges, climate change and military

conflict in our new age of permanent crisis (Social Ventures Australia and
the Centre for Social Impact, 2021; Riboldi et al., 2022). In particular,
non-profits need to know what data they have, what data they lack, and
how their staff can work ethically and effectively with data.

Data Capability and Field-Building

Acknowledging there are wider gains to be had, Riboldi et al.’s (2022)

report, capturing post-pandemic Australian non-profit leaders’ views,
showed a clear consensus for a move away from charismatic and hierar-
chical leadership practices, towards community engaged, collaborative
decision-making. Leaders reflected on the near impossibility of building
new partnerships during the COVID-19 crisis, pointing to the signifi-
cance of being able to leverage “pre-existing relationships, data and
insights” when reaching out to government agencies for funding and sup-
port (Riboldi et al., 2022, p. 97). Collective working has long been urged
for the non-profit sector (Austin and Seitanidi, 2012; Butcher, 2014).
Working with data can be a driver and underpinning structure for non-
profit collaborations. In our projects we have shown multiple ways and
levels that data projects work to build collaborations (see Chaps. 2 and 3).
Working collaboratively to harness and activate data resources can help
to build preparedness and resilience for crises by generating good quality
data pools. It can draw stakeholders together to learn how to work with
each other and to build social capital. Discussing the idea of field-building,
McLeod Grant et al. (2020) note that non-profits need to collaborate so
that bigger and stronger organisations can support smaller and niche
non-profits. This will help to keep the sector diverse and able to meet
nuanced needs of different groups and contexts. Resolving social
challenges needs a range of organisations to work together as no single
organisation can resolve complex social challenges. The field needs to join
forces on infrastructure and capabilities so it can afford to do the
formidable job it needs to achieve (McLeod Grant et al., 2020).
Collaborating with data can be a catalyst and enabler for wider
collaboration.
92 J. Farmer et al.

Data Capability and Social Justice Activism

We also want to acknowledge and promote the potential of data analytics

for social good as social justice activism. This takes non-profits’ data work
into a space beyond using it to resolve their own operational challenges.
It seeks data work that positively spills over into activating social change
in the community (Maddison & Scalmer, 2006). In this sense, non-­
profits could apply their data capability, access to multiple datasets and
knowledge generated from analysing datasets. They could direct these
resources to advocate for marginalised people within social policy
processes and to enable citizens themselves to be active with data, through
spreading digital and data skills. Here, we are saying that by engaging
citizens to work with data, non-profits can empower them with data
skills, and with access to new knowledge assets about their communities.
Data for social good as activism aligns with Williams’ (2020) depiction of
social data projects as data action. She explains activism as being about
inclusion of diverse participants, including citizens, tackling social
challenges using different datasets and about ground-truthing with
grassroots perspectives. Wells (2020) also highlights the credentials of
data for good as social activism, saying “data for good means data for all,
prioritizing equity, supporting local leaders, and questioning power
dynamics, with ethics as a top priority” (para. 1).
Involving the wider community is crucial to avoid repeating past mis-
takes involving abuses of data that have led to risk aversion and fear. Making
active steps to engage citizens is significant in shifting power dynamics.
Here, we draw on distinctions made by community informatics researcher
Michael Gurstein (2011), for example, who argued that making data
openly available (as in open data initiatives) has tended to merely hand data
assets to those already powerful through controlling and running systems.
Gurstein pointed out that active steps to engage beyond managers and
leaders are vital for empowering marginalised or disadvantaged groups.
Similarly, Kitchin (2013) highlighted that money spent on generating
accessible re-used data resources is money not spent directly on supporting
marginalised citizens. Consequently, access to data must be democratised
 4 Activating for a Data-Capable Future 93

and citizens actively empowered to engage with data and inform its appli-
cation. If not, increased forays into data analytics by non-profits might be
seen as representing a diversion of scarce resources to bolster power among
those who already enjoy it.

Three Stages of Non-profits’ Data Capability

Building data capability, then, is significant to non-profits’ business compe-

tency, field-building and supporting social change. At its most basic, partici-
pating in a data project using collaborative data action can be pitched to
leaders as an efficient learning programme about working with data. It is sig-
nificant that non-profits should be skilled and knowledgeable about work-
ing with data as the sector comes under increasing pressure from funders
seeking accountability and from technology corporates and data social busi-
nesses seeking market share. Salesforce, for example, a US software company
specialising in customer relationship management software, has a suite of
products specially for the non-profit sector (Moltzau, 2019). Googling non-
profit data analytics produces multiple pages of blogs and news ephemera
generated by businesses aiming to persuade non-profits to engage with their
data products and services. The non-profit sector needs data capability so it
does not end up in thrall to Big Tech. Non-profits need know-how so they
can be discerning about what is offered and able to ask questions to probe
the ‘black box’ of commercial data products and systems. On the other
hand, non-profits need data capability so they can collaborate as a field with
government and philanthropic foundation procurers about sensible data
generation and reporting.
Given that it could be difficult to convince non-profit leaders, board
members or staff to divert resources to building internal data capability,
we do not recommend every organisation to jump straight into complex
arrangements, like participating in a data collaborative. Nor do we suggest
that every non-profit should seek access to open or commercial datasets
or undertake deep dives into sensitive data. Instead, building capability
could take an incremental, staged approach:
94 J. Farmer et al.

Stage One: Build Organisational Data Capability The individual non-

profit organisation builds off its existing data skills, practices and technolo-
gies and uses these resources as a launchpad to develop and improve.
Stage Two: Build Sector Data Capability Extending out from internal
capability, the organisation engages in data collaborations with others in
the non-profit sector. Leaders and staff seek out like-minded collabora-
tors who are interested in similar topics and questions and who hold
useful resources.
Stage Three: Build Community Data Capability Clients, consumers
and citizens are engaged to work in equitable partnerships with data.
Beyond the non-profit and achieving its operational work in better ways,
this stage gives potential to actively extend data capability to the
community.

Data Analytics as Business as Usual

In Chaps. 2 and 3, we focused on data projects. However, that doesn’t
show how data analytics can become embedded as part of a new kind of
‘business as usual’ for non-profits. It doesn’t consider what happens before
and leading up to a data project—or what happens after. Here, we cover
those phases. Looking first at preparing for a data project and then
suggesting activities for proceeding after an initial data project has been
undertaken.

Getting Started

In our projects, it has sometimes taken multiple discussions before organisa-

tions commit to participating in a data project. Where organisations have
been quicker to commit, this tends to be facilitated by interactions with one
or more enthusiastic organisational champions. These participants also often
help by pulling together other interested staff and leaders. Undertaking our
data projects has given some pointers about what could help a staff member
seeking to take this book to their manager to argue for their organisation
 4 Activating for a Data-Capable Future 95

‘getting into data analytics’, perhaps by engaging in a data project. Below are
some of those pointers.

See Data Projects as a Way to Learn About (Your) Data Doing a small
data project gives non-profits’ staff and leaders the opportunity to experi-
ment with data. It allows for dialogue and collaboration with colleagues
within an organisation through a novel opportunity to test the creative
potential of their own organisation’s datasets.
When undertaking practical data projects with non-profits, we tended
to find similar concerns at the start. Many of our participants recognised
that their organisations had lots of data and that they should or could be
doing something with it. However, participants didn’t clearly understand
what data they had, what data they lacked—and how they might ask
questions and answer them with data. Doing a data project, using a col-
laborative data action methodology, can address these issues through
engaging colleagues collaboratively with their data and their own organ-
isation’s challenges.
The key benefits for organisations working on practical data projects
(such as those in Chap. 2) were that participants learned new hands-on
skills for working with specific software programmes, statistical models or
modes of data visualisation. Much of that learning was about realising
they didn’t need to become data scientists. Rather, they learned new
languages and practices that enabled them to cooperate across silos and
specialisms to understand the value of data in their own organisational
contexts. This, in turn, allowed participants to assess what was required
in their organisation to realise the kind of data capability they needed to
build. By involving a range of staff including managers and frontline
workers, there was scope for learning about interactions between data
and the roles of different staff members, including understanding the
benefits of collecting complete datasets and of being clear around consent
to use and re-use data.

Identify Internal Data Champions and Collaborators Leadership is a

key aspect of a data project. Those seeking to do a data project should make
early moves to identify senior organisation champions who can drive it.
These people will be the connectors with internal teams as well as working
96 J. Farmer et al.

with any external data collaborators (i.e., partners that you may have in
other organisations). This champion role involves organising meetings and
co-ordinating data protocols or brokering any necessary agreements with
external data collaborators (including agreements to identify and share
data, as discussed in Chap. 3). The role should not be delegated to junior
staff unless they have sufficient authority (and time) to undertake these
tasks across the duration of the project. While data champions have a lead
role, it is significant to have a range of staff involved in data projects.
Frontline workers, in particular, will have knowledge of clients and com-
munity needs and the ways in which it is feasible to collect and use data.
Identify External Data Collaborators and Resources These data col-
laborators may be brought together to form the kind of multi-­skilled and
multi-resourced data analytics teams described in our projects. In Chap.
3 and the appendix, we outlined various policy institutes, university data
labs and other types of institutions with experience in data for social good
projects, and perhaps with access to technology and skilled staff resources.
These might act as skilled data collaborators, but a non-profit can also
work with other non-profits or other organisations with aligned mission
and access to useful skills, resources and perspectives.
Identify Funding Undertaking a data project takes time, commitment
and material resources. Whether a non-profit is keen to build internal
data capability or collaborate with data scientists and social scientists as
in our projects, sufficient funding is essential to ensure that all parties
have the time and resources to do the work. The amount of funding
required will vary according to the scale and scope of activities. In the
projects outlined in Chap. 2, co-funding was provided by our university,
philanthropic organisations, national and state government research
funding agencies and our non-profit and other organisation partners. The
senior researchers provided their time as an ‘in-kind’ contribution, but
this practice is not always supported by universities. Other ways to access
expertise could be through volunteer data scientists, as in DataKind proj-
ects (see Appendix). Other resources are also required in data projects
including computers and software. While this may seem obvious at first
glance, we mention these resources because their costs are not always
factored into project grant funding applications.
 4 Activating for a Data-Capable Future 97

Be Vigilant About Ethics and Inclusion Advocates and researchers

globally have been promoting data for social good for nearly a decade. But
the leaders in this field (e.g., Williams, 2020) also caution us about the
ethical issues associated with data analytics. In Chaps. 1 and 3, we high-
lighted the importance of having appropriate consent and clarity around
what consent is in place before considering what can be done with data.
However, there are other concerns embedded even within datasets that
should be borne in mind. Expertise in thinking about hidden ethical issues
in data should be built into collaborative teams. As Guyan (2022) observes,
even the collection of apparently simple demographic data involves deci-
sions around which kinds of data will be collected—for example, regard-
ing gender, sexuality and trans experience. These choices have significant
impacts on who is visible within data and thus how communities, organ-
isations and other phenomena will appear when data is analysed. Decisions
based on these data will affect how resources and services are allocated.
Similarly, ethical questions should be asked regarding the potential unin-
tended consequences of collecting, collating and communicating with
data. As Williams puts it, “data are people” (2020, p. 220). Even well-
intentioned data projects can cause harm when they are used to justify
surveillance or control of those whose data is analysed within them.
Williams (2020) warns against what she terms ‘hubris’ in data projects
asking: “Why do we often think the data analyst can find the right ques-
tions to ask without asking those who have in-depth knowledge of the
topics we seek to understand?” (p. xvi). As discussed at other points in this
book, the centrality of citizens in data does suggest that non-profits need
to work to include service users in data projects. While there are useful
frameworks and approaches to inform this work, including around
Indigenous data sovereignty (Carroll et al., 2020) (discussed in Chap. 1),
tested methods and approaches for non-profits engaging their clients and
consumers with data are a work-in-progress, we suggest. While waiting for
ethics and inclusion practices specifically in relation to this field to mature,
we recommend taking the advice of Williams (2020). She suggests using
the best ethics practices currently available and ‘interprets’ Zook et al.’s
(2017) ten simple rules for responsible big data research to provide a list of
ethical principles for data action projects (Williams, 2020, p. 93).
98 J. Farmer et al.

Moving Beyond a Data Project: Next Steps

Once one or more experimental data projects have been completed,

enthusiasm fired up and initial data capability is built—then what comes
after? How might an organisation work to embed data analytics into
business as usual?
Investing for ongoing working with data could involve a non-profit
adding new specialist staff and technologies or it could involve
collaborating with other non-profits and others to access specialists and
technologies. Either way, this suggests different ways of future working
need to be considered.
It is increasingly suggested that any organisation, whether building
their own team of data specialists or collaborating with others, should
designate a data steward (Verhulst et al., 2020). Data stewards have a lead
role in data governance and hold knowledge about an organisation’s
datasets, how they were collected and how they can be used. Data stewards
can work with other organisations’ data stewards if data is to be shared or
used in data collaboratives. They are significant to generating “a richer
institutional environment around data” (Hardinges & Keller, 2022, para.
23). The Open Data Institute further promotes the idea of data institutions
(Hardinges & Keller, 2022). These can help to support those organisations
that don’t or can’t afford to invest in dedicated data teams. Data institutions
are advocated to help to “steward data on behalf of others” and to support
data analytics (Hardinges & Keller, 2022, para. 1). They could take a
variety of forms including data collaboratives. Working with a data
institution implies the idea of a non-profit contributing to and being part
of a type of collective data capability resource.
Our Data Co-op platform, which we used to enable the data projects
described in Chap. 2, can be understood as a data institution (for other
examples, see Appendix). The platform represents an expensive collective
resource of data science skills, technologies and data management
practices (https://datacoop.com.au/). As such, a non-profit can collaborate
with us to use the platform to drive their data projects and their routine
data analytics work and/or non-profits can work together to share data in
collaborative projects (as in Case Study 3). Our Data Co-op is a cloud-
hosted platform developed by our Social Data Analytics (SoDA) Lab in
 4 Activating for a Data-Capable Future 99

collaboration with four other Australian Universities and with funding

from the Australian Research Council. The platform enables researchers
and collaborating partners to use secure virtual environments to access,
connect, geospatially map and explore correlations between variables in
datasets. These secure data environments provide close integration with
Microsoft PowerBI data analytics, enabling advanced visualisation of
datasets. Much of the data used in our projects is open public data, such
as that of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), but the platform also
has a secure data layer that can hold de-identified and encrypted datasets
from collaborating organisations.
While working with a data institution is a way for non-profits to
extend their data capability, access to data institutions is not ubiquitous
across the world, at present. Generating further access to data-institution-­
like environments, though, is an area where philanthropy could invest to
nurture the data for social good movement (Hendey et al., 2020).
Throughout this book, we have argued that building data capability is
important for the future of the non-profit sector and supporting social
good. However, non-profits are cash-strapped and there are structural
barriers to them pooling resources. In this environment, helping to build
sectoral non-profit data capability is a prime space for philanthropic
foundations seeking to secure the future of social purpose organisations
and to promote social innovation. Philanthropy could support a range of
small to larger-scale data initiatives that would be impossible for individual
non-profits to pursue alone. There are already some examples of
philanthropy supporting non-profits’ data capability internationally. As
an example, data.org is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the
MasterCard Centre for Inclusive Growth in the US to “democratize and
reimagine data science to tackle society’s greatest challenges and improve
lives across the globe” (The Rockefeller Foundation, 2022). In Australia,
where we work, this kind of philanthropic investment to build capability
in the non-profit sector has tended to happen in small projects (e.g., see
Case Study 2, funded by the Melbourne-based Lord Mayor’s Charitable
Foundation). Part of the challenge is that foundations traditionally tend
to target topics or themes rather than capability-building and
infrastructure. However, perhaps the pandemic—by shining a spotlight
on the value of online services—might spur more action on infrastructure
100 J. Farmer et al.

funding by philanthropy as more reports highlight non-profits’

technology-related capability gaps (Riboldi et al., 2022; King et al.,
2022). Philanthropy could support place-based initiatives among
collaborating non-profits like our City of Greater Bendigo Data
Collaborative (Case Study 3), and as in the US National Neighborhood
Indicators Partnerships (2022), and theme-based initiatives that support
organisations to collaborate to tackle social challenges. Non-profits could
be supported to work in data collaborations with each other and/or to
work with existing or new data institutions.

Innovations to Solve Data Challenges

The previous chapters have raised technical challenges in progressing data
analytics that go beyond simply persuading leaders to get involved. Data
sharing, for example, has been raised as perhaps the biggest challenge
(Verhulst, 2021). The tendency of small experimental projects in the field
is also problematical because it raises questions about the scalability of
data analytics within the sector. The good news is that there are rapid
changes taking place that are relevant to data for social good. At the same
time as generating excitement, the sheer amount of potentially relevant
innovation means it is hard to keep up with change. It’s also hard to judge
what might ‘stick’. Here, we share a few examples of emerging innovations
to highlight the field’s dynamism and to highlight the need for critical
thinking about the many opportunities. It’s hard to tell how quickly, if at
all, some innovations could affect non-profits’ work with data and in
some cases, whether the innovations actually are ‘for good’.
Addressing the problem of many small projects, DataKind (an interna-
tional data science volunteering organisation) has recently established a
Centre of Excellence to build non-profits’ data capability. A key pillar of
work is termed Impact Practices (Porway, 2019). The idea built from staff of
DataKind identifying that many projects they undertake with social ser-
vices and non-profits are grouped around similar topics or harness similar
techniques. With Impact Practices, DataKind aims to compile, make avail-
able and form collaborations around data analytics solutions addressing
like topics. In this way, rather than each project starting from scratch and
 4 Activating for a Data-Capable Future 101

working with DataKind to build something new, work in topics can be

translated across non-profits targeting the same social challenge. Porway
(2019) writes that work is moving from a project-based model to a practice-
based model—featuring portfolios of data science projects by theme. In a
blog announcing the new initiative, an example is given of many projects
targeting early detection of disease outbreaks. Rather than building multi-
ple small projects, Impact Practices will unite participants to “understand
what data is available, and test real prototypes in the field to understand
what’s really possible” (Porway, 2019, p. 3).
DataKind’s work is dedicated to solving problems of the non-profit sec-
tor, and it works internationally, suggesting strong potential for Impact
Practices to translate to different contexts and sizes of non-profits, poten-
tially widely influencing non-profit data analytics into the near future.
This transferability may be less likely for our next example of innovation,
which is targeted at enabling data sharing. As highlighted in Chap. 3, data
sharing between organisations is a significant challenge due to each having
different arrangements for consent and privacy. Internationally, there are
different privacy regulations around secondary use of data varying by coun-
try jurisdictions, for example, the EU General Data Protection Regulation
(European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, 2016). To
address problems of data sharing across government institutions and bor-
ders, the UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for
Official Statistics is running a pilot programme using Privacy Enhancing
Technologies (PETs) (The Economist Science & Technology, 2022).
Current work is targeting international trade data sharing between five
countries’ national data agencies. PETs help data providers and data users
to safely share information by using encryption and privacy protocols that
allow someone to produce useful output data without ‘seeing’ the input
data. They also ensure that anonymity of data will be protected throughout
its lifecycle and that outputs cannot be used to ‘reverse engineer’ the origi-
nal data (UN PET Lab, 2022).
This technology is exciting, but only recently initiated and occurring
between national statistical offices so innovations developed could take a
long time to filter down to become a technology that is routinely accessible
to non-profits.
102 J. Farmer et al.

Finally, a concern we raise in various places is citizen involvement. We

have noted an imperative to have citizens engaged in data governance and
data use, but their inclusion can be hindered by fear of discussing data
use and lack of easily useable engagement methods. Elsewhere, we’ve
mentioned citizen data sovereignty initiatives—for example, EU-funded
project DECODE (https://decodeproject.eu/what-­decode.html) that is
experimenting with ways citizens can decide what happens with their
data (Monge et al., 2022). And we’ve also mentioned good practice in
Indigenous data sovereignty that can guide work with citizens (Carroll
et al., 2020). In some countries internationally—in this case, in Australia,
where we work—consumer data rights laws have been established,
ostensibly to enable citizens to understand their data and to use it for
their empowerment. The Australian Consumer Data Right (CDR) is
suggested to give citizens choice and control over the data that businesses
hold about them (Australian Government, 2020). It enables people to
transfer their data to another business to find products and services better
tailored to their needs (Australian Government, 2022). Unfortunately,
though, as highlighted by Goggin et al. (2019), the driver for this Act is
actually to generate new data businesses and the way the Act is explained
and promoted is directed at business, with little attention to educating
and activating consumers in data literacy. As Goggin et al. (2019)
conclude: “In Australia, it is notable that efforts to respond to concern
[about consumer data rights] have come, not in the context of an overhaul
of privacy laws or digital rights generally, but via efforts, by market-­
oriented policy bodies …” (p. 12).
This is an example of government enthusiasm for data initiatives resulting
in the advancement of for-profit data markets in which public data becomes
a product that is commercialised by private developers (Bates, 2012).
However, it also potentially serves to highlight an opportunity of where
non-profits could harness emergent legislation to empower and advocate for
consumers. Non-profits need data capability so they can recognise and har-
ness emergent initiatives like consumer data rights legislation and turn them
into opportunities to help build citizen data and digital literacy.
The examples of innovations in this section are used to illustrate the
ongoing emerging initiatives that are relevant to non-profits’ data
 4 Activating for a Data-Capable Future 103

analytics. They show that current data analytics challenges are likely to be
resolved, but it will take time. They also raise the issue of how to keep up
with the pace of change and the many disciplines and perspectives that
influence it. This further supports the value of collaborating with others,
if only simply to have a chance to keep up-to-date with a fast-changing field.

Research Reflections and Next Steps

Our Research Reflections

Taking a step back to reflect on the research you’ve done in a field over
several projects and years is an indulgence in a pressurised funding
environment. However, it is important to do as it reveals patterns and
sometimes surprises. In this case, having promoted the benefits of cross-­
disciplinary and multi-perspective working throughout this book, the
realisation dawned that this also makes the work quite challenging. One
thing that has come to the fore in writing this book is the complexity that
arises from trying to meld the positionality of diverse participants and
researchers. Positionality considers how your identity influences, and
potentially biases, your understanding of and outlook on the context and
phenomena you are working with (Bourke, 2014). Having different
perspectives in a data project often means that participants have varying
expectations and over-layer their learning on pre-existing frameworks
and knowledge bases. To illustrate how this works even within our writing
team, one of us sees non-profits using data analytics as being a
contemporary manifestation of community development. Others in our
team are working closely with non-profits and supporting them to
organise better for using data, giving a perspective very grounded in
operational issues; while our data scientist views the non-profit field as
one of intriguing new datasets to which a range of old and emergent
analytical techniques can be applied. Acknowledging the positionality
challenges even among our writing team has made us realise how difficult
it must be to navigate data projects for our multi-disciplinary, multi-­
department and multi-organisation practice partners. It makes us think
that those that enjoy and thrive in these data projects are likely those who
104 J. Farmer et al.

can deal with uncertainty, tolerate or be curious about different perspec-

tives and who are prepared to be flexible with their expectations.
A further issue is inherent in this work as research. It is very practical,
and it is highly participative. We have noted in places that it’s more like a
learning process than research. In terms of defining it as a research
approach, it is perhaps most akin to participatory action research
(McIntyre, 2007). The processes are fluid and while punctuated by
consistent types of steps and activities, as highlighted in Chap. 3, this can
make this work hard to write up as research. And these same issues of not
being able to pin down the process nor constrain the timeline precisely
can be off-putting for non-profits considering working on data projects.
They tend to want a defined process, with stipulated timelines and agreed
(beforehand) outputs and outcomes. All quite challenging to delineate at
the start of the kinds of data projects we outlined in Chap. 2, when you
don’t know what datasets a non-profit holds or what the consents
governing re-use of data might exist.
While these issues about the data projects can make them frustrating
and can deter some non-profits from participating, at the same time the
challenges are what make the research interesting and exciting. And the
need to tolerate fluidity means our partner organisations tend to be a self-­
selecting group of innovative early adopters, which makes them fun to
work with. This is a space of social innovation, after all.
Aligned with the idea of our partner non-profits as enthusiastic innova-
tors, we have experienced a remarkable degree of buy-in to projects once
organisations commit to starting. An example of this is participants regu-
larly turning up to data workshops over project timescales lasting
6–18 months. The City of Greater Bendigo data collaborative, for example,
continues to meet and discuss data two years after we started. In that project,
there is remarkable buy-in—perhaps because the geospatial data visualisa-
tions help service providers and businesses to think about the places where
they live and work. Participants are able, repeatedly, to bring suggestions as
to why phenomena may be ‘seen’ in the data analyses, help to ground-truth
analyses and give suggestions about datasets and topics that could be
explored next. Perhaps there is some sense of wonder at the possibility of
generating sleek new data products (in their case, a community resilience
data dashboard, see https://datacoop.com.au/bendigo/) from previously
 4 Activating for a Data-Capable Future 105

routine data produced as cross-sectional reports. There is some sense of

excitement at unleashing a valuable resource from a previously apparently
passive and dull set of spreadsheets.

What Next in Research?

Turning to what next, some topics emerge as obvious targets for research.
Bearing in mind this field is about the nexus between non-profits, their
work and mission, and data analytics, and not about other data-related
fields like computational techniques or data law. Those areas, no doubt,
have many research opportunities of their own, but we won’t talk about
those here.
We think the most significant issue is around working with citizens,
consumers, clients and the community. Feasible, easily applied methods for
doing this—with and for non-profits—need to be developed and tested
and to become industry standards. Non-profits need to build their data
capability, so they are confident and skilled in data to engage with consum-
ers and clients in conversations about data without fear. In Chap. 1, we
talked about how initiatives like the National Neighborhood Indicators
Partnership engage people with (largely) open data and how this is a way to
build citizen data literacy and community capability (Murray et al., 2015).
This suggests that learning and engagement are best done through topic-
focused engagement, rather than teaching focused on data literacy skills.
Another approach is to work with consumer representative groups that
many non-profits already have and start to engage people in conversations
about the data they are in, data governance and re-use of data in analyses.
A second area for exploration is the set of issues around the experience
of working in non-profits that have data capability; for example, what
difference to organisational functioning, client outcomes and staff
motivation does having a positive data culture make? As we propose that
working collaboratively with data can help to integrate the work of staff
and organisations, can this be evidenced robustly, and what are the
impacts of better integrated organisations? Ultimately, what we are saying
here is that we do not know the impacts on organisational mission and
106 J. Farmer et al.

outcomes of having data capability, though we surmise there are benefits.

To date, our research has focused on processes of building data capability,
but what does that enable? Crudely, what is the difference between a non-­
profit that has data capability and one that does not? To date, there are
data maturity frameworks, but how do differences in data maturity
manifest as lived experiences for organisations, staff, clients and
consumers? As more non-profits build their data capability, it will be
exciting to see how this changes organisational structures and whether it
brings together, and helps to build the strength of non-profits as a field—
as we propose and hope for.
A final set of research questions sits around the potential for non-­
profits’ using artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making
systems as these techniques become more accessible and more used. A
recent blog post from Data Orchard, a UK-based data for social good
consultancy, suggested that 15% of charities are now using AI (Vaux,
2021). AI demands large datasets, and so it has been suggested that,
despite hype around the efficiencies it can enable, only large non-profits
are likely to benefit (Bernholz, 2019; Moltzau, 2019). Cases can be found
illustrating use of AI for large datasets, including by Greenpeace for
donor segmentation, rainforest protection by analysing mobile phone
data and case law analysis by human rights lawyers (Moltzau, 2019;
Paver, 2021). Alongside this, there is interest in the potential of AI in
place-based initiatives. The GovLab’s AI Localism (https://ailocalism.
org/) is a repository of AI case studies generated by cities, regions and
global initiatives (Verhulst et al., 2021). Links between growing data
capability of non-profits and entry to using AI is an important area to
understand as it unfolds. Of interest is what AI might affect, in terms of
the structure and nature of the future non-profit sector. Perhaps the
efficiencies it enables for large non-profits will serve to drive further
corporatisation and ‘survival of the biggest’. But perhaps there will be
imaginative place or theme-related AI initiatives based on data
collaboratives or collective practices, serving to unite and enable AI and
advanced data analytics as non-profit field-building. Participatory AI or
how to include stakeholders and citizens in designing ethical AI is another
area to watch for non-profits (Bondi et al., 2021).
 4 Activating for a Data-Capable Future 107

 ey Takeaways from This Chapter

K
and Conclusions
In this chapter we explored how non-profits having data capability could
impact on the whole sector and society as well as giving some practical
steps about what to do next within organisations. We looked at some
future directions for data analytics and highlighted areas for future
research. Key takeaways from this chapter are presented below.

Key Takeaways

• Building data capability can benefit non-profits by helping to: (1) manage
most effectively and show impact; (2) build a ‘field’ that collaborates with
data to tackle social challenges; (3) generate new ways to address social
inequity through community data capability and digital inclusion.
• To influence the manager of a non-profit to engage with data analytics:
suggest involvement in a data project as efficient ‘learning by doing’;
get internal champions and collaborators on board; explore external
expert help and resources; identify funding; and include ethics from
the start.
• To extend beyond a data project: identify an organisational data stew-
ard to oversee internal data resources; and identify data institutions that
could help to access external support for advanced projects.
• While there are current technical and legal challenges, innovation is
ongoing that may enable scaling-up from experimental to large-scale
practices. Allying with a data institution could help to keep up
with change.
• Key areas for future research are engaging clients and citizens in non-­
profits’ data work; examining impacts of data capability on organisational
performance and impact; and use of AI by non-profits.

This chapter concludes this book in which we set out to propose that
any non-profit can engage with data for social good and build their data
capability. While there are many challenges in this space, we hope this
book makes it seem entirely doable. We also hope that while this new
capability will help with non-profits’ business competitiveness, it can also
be experienced as a space where people work together to find creativity
and enlightenment.
108 J. Farmer et al.

With its many initiatives, active and high-profile advocates (e.g., Sir
Tim Berners-Lee as co-director of the Open Data Institute), data for
social good could be described as almost an industry in itself now.
Through collaboration and experimenting with data, we suggest that all
non-profits should get inside this big tent. We end with a plea—we ask
non-profits to beware getting picked off as individual organisations by
commercial businesses selling their proprietary data systems. We urge
staff and managers instead to get knowledgeable, get skilled, make
collaborating ‘data friends’ of other non-profits and their staff, and to
develop their organisation’s data capability. This will drive the non-profit
sector’s data capability for good into the future. Most of all, we suggest
people should just get started with working with data and experimental
data projects. We urge non-profits to have fun with data in ways that
simultaneously help to do (more) good with data.

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Appendix: The Data Innovation Ecosystem
and Its Resources

Initiatives
Initiatives in different countries are progressing innovations relevant to
data analytics for non-profits. Figure A.1 shows some types of initiatives
in the ecosystem and the range of goals they are aiming to achieve. A
recent taxonomy of AI and data for social good from data.org provides an
extended map of initiatives in the landscape.1
Below, we list some examples of the key types of initiatives. Later in
this section, we also outline some of the kinds of resources and support
available from these. There are many examples of initiatives, they exist
around the world and new initiatives keep emerging, so this list is by no
means comprehensive. We focused on initiatives and resources that we
have used and that influenced our work to date.

1
Porway, J. (2022). A taxonomy for AI/data for good. Data.org. Retrieved March 21, 2022, from
https://data.org/news/a-taxonomy-for-ai-data-for-good/.

© The Author(s) 2023 113

J. Farmer et al., Data for Social Good, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5554-9
114 Appendix: The Data Innovation Ecosystem and Its Resources

Fig. A.1 Initiatives and goals of the non-profits’ data innovation ecosystem

Think Tanks and Policy Institutes

The GovLab (https://thegovlab.org/) is a policy institute based at

New York University that targets capability-building for public sector
governance and has developed pioneering models and tools around data
governance and re-use; for example, datacollaboratives.org has a method-
ology and a portal to host international data collaboratives (https://data-
collaboratives.org/).
Both The GovLab (US) and NESTA (UK) (https://nesta.org.uk/
project/data-­analytics/) undertake demonstrator and experimental
projects to push the boundaries of social data analytics practice and
establish standards. Advocating for use of data for social good, they
sometimes work with partner organisations including non-profits and
have wider goals as ‘data institutions’2 to leave a practical legacy including

2
Hardinges, J., & Keller, J. R. (2022). What are data institutions and why are they important? The
Open Data Institute. Retrieved March 29, 2022, from https://theodi.org/article/what-are-data-­
institutions-and-why-are-they-important/#:~:text=Data%20institutions%20are%20organisa-
tions%20that,into%20our%20theory%20of%20change.
 Appendix: The Data Innovation Ecosystem and Its Resources 115

tools and data capability. Much of the work of these organisations is

funded via philanthropic foundations, governments or corporates.
Specifically targeting non-profits, the Stanford University Digital Civil
Society Lab (https://pacscenter.stanford.edu/research/digital-­civil-­society-­
lab/) has a repository of useful tools to increase data analytics capability,
generated from high-quality projects.
Some initiatives are focused on building capability of citizens and
communities—for example, the Washington DC-based Urban Institute’s
National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) (https://www.
neighborhoodindicators.org/) has a mission “to ensure all communities
have access to data and the skills to use information to advance equity
and well-being across neighborhoods”.3 The focus is on using suburb or
community-level data and engaging local citizens, services and non-­
profits together to inform local decision-making and empower through
democratizing information.
The NNIP supports organisations at city and region level to codesign
community indicators with citizens and to train local people as citizen
scientists to gather neighbourhood data to ground truth analyses based
on open public data.4 One example, drawn from the NNIP online case
studies library, illustrates how community-based data projects work. The
City of Oakland, US, developed a new strategy for addressing violence in
the community. Existing city administrative data about reported crime,
gang activity and domestic violence was analysed. Simultaneously, 16
community residents were trained to collect data about local lived
experiences. Based on analyses of quantitative city data and qualitative
evidence about experiences, citizens and city staff generated data-driven
ideas for the new strategy, including re-evaluating gun violence prevention
programmes and using trauma-informed principles.
Neighborhood Partnerships and their projects are typically funded by
multiple participating organisations and philanthropy.
Other significant policy institutes and think tanks include the Open
Data Institute (https://theodi.org/), the Ada Lovelace Institute—funded

3
National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership. (2022). NNIP Mission. Retrieved March 21,
2022, from https://www.neighborhoodindicators.org/about-nnip/nnip-mission.
4
National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership. (2022). NNIP Mission. Retrieved March 21,
2022, from https://www.neighborhoodindicators.org/about-nnip/nnip-mission.
116 Appendix: The Data Innovation Ecosystem and Its Resources

by the Nuffield Foundation in the UK (https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.

org/) and the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University, Wales (https://
datajusticelab.org/).

Data Science Volunteering

This kind of initiative harnesses the power of data scientists who volunteer
their skills to work with socially oriented organisations to explore the
potential of using data—often via hackathons and projects. DataKind
(https://www.datakind.org/) is one such organisation, operating through
franchised ‘chapters’ in the UK, the US, India and Singapore. DataKind
has established criteria that prospective data projects must meet in order
to access volunteer help and access to the DataKind methodology. Once
a data project is accepted, DataKind works through a set of steps with
organisations to identify datasets, imagine useful data solutions and then
to work through processes to prototype suitable solutions. One criterion
for participation in DataKind projects is that the organisation will be able
to maintain the data solution beyond the initial project. This suggests
some pre-existing data capability is needed—although discussions on the
DataKind website, giving feedback from different projects, suggest
DataKind projects are good opportunities for non-profits to learn and
extend knowledge.
As an example, DataKind volunteers worked with a UK food bank to
develop a machine-learning model that predicts which clients will be
highest users, allowing the food bank to prioritise these citizens for
additional support.

University Social Data Analytics Labs

Universities around the world may be particularly well-placed to work

with non-profits on practical collaborative projects that foster
experimentation and growth of data capability. This is partly because
universities are experienced in bringing together expertise from across
disciplines and in facilitating partnerships across research and practice
 Appendix: The Data Innovation Ecosystem and Its Resources 117

boundaries.5 Some have social data analytics labs for research and
development and to give data science students experience of working
with non-profits. Examples include Auckland University Centre for
Social Data Analytics, New Zealand; University of West Georgia Data
Analysis and Visualization Lab, US; and our Social Data Analytics Lab at
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne Australia (https://www.
s w i n b u r n e . e d u . a u / r e s e a r c h / i n s t i t u t e s / s o c i a l -­i n n o v a t i o n /
social-­data-­analytics-­lab/).

Demonstrator Projects

Large funding bodies can generate demonstrator projects to trial new

ideas and solutions. One such large project is the European Union-­
funded Project DECODE (DEcentralised Citizen-owned Data
Ecosystems; see https://decodeproject.eu/). It focuses on exploring citizen
data sovereignty practices, with demonstrator sites in cities including
Barcelona and Amsterdam.6

Socially Oriented Data Consultancies and Businesses

For-profit and social businesses have emerged that work with non-profits
and other organisations to generate tools and re-used data resources.
Examples of businesses include Data Orchard (UK), a non-profit consul-
tancy that developed a Data Maturity Framework for non-profits to
assess organisational progress in data capability (see https://www.dataor-
chard.org.uk/); Seer Data and Analytics (Australia) that works with non-
profits and communities to design data dashboards for community
development (see https://seerdata.ai/); and Neighbourlytics (Australia)
that re-uses data generated by social media and sharing platforms to

5
Tripp, W., Gage, D., & Williams, H. (2020). Addressing the data analytics gap: A community
university partnership to enhance analytics capabilities in the non-profit sector. Collaborations: A
Journal of Community-Based Research and Practice, 3(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.33596/coll.58.
6
Monge, F., Barns, S., Kattel, R., & Bria, F. (2022). A new data deal: The case of Barcelona (Working
Paper Series No. WP 2022/02). UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Retrieved
March 21, 2022, from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/wp2022-02.
118 Appendix: The Data Innovation Ecosystem and Its Resources

provide analyses about social characteristics of places (see https://neigh-

bourlytics.com/).

Initiatives with Government Funding

There are some government initiatives that can be accessed for ideas and
potentially partnerships and grant funding, for example, The Data Lab
(https://thedatalab.com/) has a mission to “help Scotland maximise value
from data and lead the world to a data powered future”.7 It supports busi-
nesses of all kinds to use data, helps to run courses, and supports student-
ships and student placements. It is funded by the Scottish Funding
Council as part of its Innovation Centres programme.

 seful Resources for Non-Profits Developing

U
Data Projects
There are many existing resources and tools that can be drawn on for
examples and guidance when considering specific aspects of data projects
and building capability. Table A.1 highlights some examples we have
drawn on in our work. New resources and tools are frequently being
developed.

7
The Data Lab. (2022). The Data Lab is Scotland’s Innovation Centre for data and AI. Retrieved
April 14, 2022, from https://thedatalab.com.
Table A.1 Tools and guides from existing initiatives
Tools and guides about these topics
Initiative and its Data governance and Ethics and Working with Curated
focus Contracts management Skills consent Data sharing citizens collections
Digital Civil  • Templates  • Digital impact  • Digital  • Templates  • Tools and
Society Lab, for data toolkit organisa for consent templates
Stanford contracts  • Data inventory tional chart specifically
University, US  • Organisational  • How to hire for
Digital civil policy inventory a data non-
society and  • Data governance expert guide profits
philanthropy workbook and data
National  • Data management  • Data sharing,  • Reports on:
Neighbor practices storage and Data walks;
hood  • Data governance consent guide Engaging
Indicators tools and guides communities, etc.
Partnership,  • Data usability
Urban guide
Institute, US
Building
community
data capacity
DataKind, US,  • Center of  • Practitioners
UK, Singapore, excellence guide to data
India  • DataKind ethics
Data playbook
philanthropy
and
volunteering
Open Data  • Data toolkit for  • Explainers  • Ethics canvas  • Explainers and
Institute, UK business and guides on guides on data
Equitable access skills sharing
to data  • Open standards
innovation for health data
sharing

(continued)
Table A.1 (continued)
Tools and guides about these topics
Initiative and its Data governance and Ethics and Working with Curated
focus Contracts management Skills consent Data sharing citizens collections
Data Justice Lab,  • Guidebook
Wales with examples
Data and social of methods
justice, digital
citizenship
Ada Lovelace  • Guide to
Institute, UK citizen
Ethical and participation
societal in data use
impacts of
data and AI
NESTA, UK  • Map the Gap tool  • Data sharing
Data analytics in to map data toolkit
health, labour challenges
markets and
creative arts
Governance Lab  • Example  • Data  • Data sharing  • Tools for
at New York contracts responsibility tools and data
University for data framework methodologies re-use
Datacolla collabo
boratives.org, ration
US
Strengthening
institutions
through better
use of data
 Glossary1

Use of computer-controlled techniques to analyse large

AI (artificial intelligence)
datasets to discover new insights, patterns and relationships in data.
Collaborative data action The practice of experimenting and discovering with
data, involving data collaborators, perhaps from different departments of an
organisation or from different organisations. Collaborative data action
involves bringing different skills and backgrounds together to apply data ana-
lytics for new insights and learning.
Data analytics The process of generating data and examining it to find patterns
and insights that can aid decision-making and offer courses of action.
Data capability A holistic concept involving having the right skills, technologies
and data management practices for your non-profit organisation’s size,
mission and context. Data capability of non-profits will change over time as
they get more experienced and want to do more with data—that is, data
capability is situated and should meld and flex in relation to context. The
term ‘data capacity’ is sometimes used interchangeably with data capability.
Data capacity See data capability above.

1
This glossary gives our understanding of terms as we use them in this book.

© The Author(s) 2023 121

J. Farmer et al., Data for Social Good, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5554-9
122 Glossary

Data collaboration Where different participants work together with data, per-
haps across an organisation’s departments or across a range of organisations.
This type of collaboration could be formalised in a data collaborative.
Data collaborative A formal arrangement or type of project where organisations
or entities agree to work together for data sharing.
Data collaborators People or entities that work with you in your data project or
collaboration. Typically, different data collaborators may bring different
resources to a project, such as data science skills or non-profit practice
experience. Data collaborators may be from different organisations or depart-
ments working together in a data collaboration.
Data co-op We use this term to include situations where organisations co-oper-
ate together, with their data, to address a social mission. The term is also
applied to situations where citizens co-operate to apply their own data for
causes they select.
Data dashboard An interactive data visualisation tool that provides ability to
filter, search and explore different aspects of a dataset.
Data for social good Application of contemporary data science techniques to
datasets to address a social mission or question.
Data governance The systems and processes so that an organisation can ensure
data is managed and analysed responsibly, legally and ethically.
Data institution Organisations that work to support non-profits, communities
and others to work more actively with data, often aiming for social good.
Data intermediary An entity that can act in a range of ways to support the use of
data, ranging from brokering between those generating data and those using
that data, to more supportive roles curating, supporting and enabling
collaborations between data providers and data users.
Data literacy Having the skills and competencies to work with data and critically
reflect upon data practices, uses and possible risks.
Data mapping Data mapping is the process of matching fields from one database
to another. It’s the first step to facilitate data migration, data integration and
other tasks in processes of working with data.
Data maturity A benchmark signifying that organisations have what is required
in order to make optimal use of data.
Data sharing Where organisations share their internal datasets, subject to agreed
consent, privacy and safety protocols.
Data sovereignty A way of understanding the importance of establishing con-
sent and respecting the rights of, and ensuring benefits for, those who are the
subjects of data.
 Glossary 123

Data steward Organisational lead for data governance with responsibility for
understanding the data that exists in organisations and ensuring data quality.
Data visualisation Data visualisation deals with the graphic representation of
data. It is a particularly efficient way of communicating when the data is
numerous as, for example, a time series.
Data walk A methodology to engage citizens with analysed and visualised data-
sets to help make decisions about their communities.
DataKind An international philanthropic franchise that harnesses the power of
data scientists as volunteers, working with socially oriented organisations to
explore potential from using data and to pilot data-driven innovations.
External data Data that can be accessed and used by a non-profit organisation
that comes from sources other than the non-profit organisation itself.
Geospatial data visualisation A type of data visualisation that organises and
presents data by location.
The GovLab A policy institute based at New York University that targets
capability-building for public sector governance.
Internal data Data generated by a non-profit organisation through their work.
Meta-data Data that describes other data. Metadata adds descriptive information
for items, like a case note or an image, provides information about structural
features or administrative information, like permissions.
Named entity recognition A form of natural language processing (NLP) that
seeks to find and classify named entities, such as proper nouns, people and
organisations in unstructured text or documents.
National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) US-based data for social
good learning network initiative with the goal of building data capability for
communities to advance equity and well-being.
Natural language processing (NLP) A set of computational techniques for process-
ing and analysing natural language, such as documents, social media posts
or speech.
NESTA A UK-based social innovation think tank.
Non-profit organisation A social mission-oriented organisation or community
group that does not operate to pursue profit or that reinvests profit to advance
a social mission.
Open data Data that is freely available for use, either directly or conditionally
open (subject to a risk assessment or research protocol).
Open Data Institute UK-based non-profit with a mission to raise the capability
of people and organisations to work more actively with data.
PowerBI A data visualisation tool developed and published by Microsoft.
124 Glossary

Re-used data Data generated from non-profits’ own operations which they
analyse (or re-analyse) for insights.
Shapefile A geospatial vector data format for geographic information system
software.
Topic modelling A type of statistical model for discovering the abstract ‘topics’ or
clusters that occur in a collection of documents.
Unsupervised learning model Machine-learning algorithms that learn patterns
from data without any ‘training’ or labelling by people.
 Index

A methods, 51–52
Artificial intelligence (AI), 106 origins, 50
outcomes, 57–58
project description, 49
C project goal, 48
Case study comparison, 30 Case study 2, 28, 48
Case study 1, 28, 38 before and after
collaborating partners, 31 interviews, 46–47
datasets, 32–33 collaborating partners, 39–40
findings, 36 data analysis, 43–44
methods, 34 datasets, 41–42
origins, 31–32 findings, 44–46
outcomes, 38 methods, 42–43
project description, 29–31 origins, 40
project goal, 29 outcomes, 47–48
Case study 3, 29, 58 project description, 39
collaborating partners, 49 project goal, 38
data analysis, 52–53 Center for Urban and Regional
datasets, 51 Affairs, 76
findings, 53–54 Citizen data literacy, 102

© The Author(s) 2023 125

J. Farmer et al., Data for Social Good, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5554-9
126 Index

Citizen engagement, 17–18, 20 quantitative, 11

Collaborative data action, 2, 15 sensitive data, 80
learning by doing, 68 sharing, 100
process for non-profits data sovereignty, 18
projects, 69 stewards, 78, 98
Collaborative data action temporal data, 11
methodology, 67–74 that non-profits might use, 9–10
finding data collaborators, 74–76 Data analytics, 2, 8, 103
steps, 70, 71 Data capability, 3, 13
Community resilience dashboard, 1 community model, 67
Community services outcomes tree, 11 field-building and, 91
Consumer data rights laws, 102 framework, 66
future research, 106
organisational competence
D and, 90–91
Data philanthropic support of, 99
benefits of collaboration, 91 three stages of non-profit’s data
collaborators, 75, 95 capability, 93–94
culture, 79 understanding, 64–67
data for social good, 2, 68 Data co-op platform, 84, 98
data walks, 72 Data governance, 65, 76–79
ethics and consent, 79–83 ethics, protocols and
external, 3, 9–10 policies, 81
good use of, 8–9 responsible data governance, 77
harms, 13–20, 97 DataKind, 100, 116
initiatives, 113–118 The Data Lab, 118
institutions, 98 DECODE Project, 102, 117
intermediaries, 75
internal, 3, 9
literacy, 14 F
locational data, 11 Five Safes model, 83
management, 64 Framework for Measuring Data
maturity, 14 Maturity, 66
non-profit sector and, 4–7
open data, 9
outcome data, 9 G
qualitative, 11 The GovLab, 114
 Index 127

I data and, 4–7

Indigenous cultures, 4 Non-profit starvation cycle, 6
Indigenous data sovereignty, 18 Not-for-profit industrial complex, 5

N O
National Neighborhood Indicators The Open Data Institute, 115
Partnership (NNIP), 19, 72, Data Ethics Canvas, 81
105, 115
NESTA, 114
New data perspective, 11–13 R
Non-profit data capability, 6 Re-use data perspective, 11–13
Non-profits, 5
collaboration between, 7
definition, 2 S
Non-profit sector, 4 Social justice activism, 92