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The voice of Scotland’s vibrant voluntary sector

Published by Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations

TFN is published by the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, Mansfield Traquair Centre, 15 Mansfield Place, Edinburgh, EH3 6BB. The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation. Registration number SC003558.

Data can improve your charity

This opinion piece is about 4 years old
 

Rebecca Kaye helps charities make sense of their data

NUMBERTELLING combines the world of data with design to help people and organisations make sense of their data.

We help our clients along every step of their data journey including: connection to and extraction of data; data processing (validation, cleansing, linkage and mapping); data infrastructure and reporting; statistical analysis and data visualisation.

We have experience of working across sectors although we predominately specialise in working with public sector organisations. Our existing clients include universities, NHS Scotland and local charities.

We have a number of clients within the third sector. However, our largest third sector project to date involves supporting a housing charity to achieve their aims of building strong and sustainable communities by improving local housing and the opportunities available to local people.

The charity was established in 1982 but in recent years it has been increasingly struggling with managing and effectively using the data that is available to them. A lot of their resources are spent on gathering and collecting information but little experience was available in house to harness the power of that data and use it to their benefit in order to improve the services they offer and create efficiencies in their processes.

Rebecca Kaye
Rebecca Kaye

That’s where we came in. Their data is collected and stored in a variety of systems. None of these systems are user friendly and extracting meaningful data is difficult. We worked with the organisation to help them extract and establish automated data feeds and then worked alongside multiple teams in order to build tools that would not only improve their own experience in dealing and using data but would also ultimately improve the experience they are able to provide their clients.

These improvements have been achieved by monitoring contractors that are used to fix issues and to improve the management and effectiveness of these jobs. Improvements have also been achieved by understanding pathways and user journeys (through effective use of the data) to identify bottlenecks in the process such as the length of time that it takes to receive keys to re-letting property.

Not only is the data able to help this organisation and improve their service, but the way we have implemented these tools means that no additional time is spent on creating reports. In fact, during our time working with the organisation, we have increased their efficiencies by reducing their workload by the equivalent of two full working days per month through autonomous processes.

NUMBERTELLING will be exhibiting at The Gathering 2020, where you can find us at stand 93. We will be showcasing some of the tools that we have implemented in a variety of clients and would be happy to talk you through our services and how we could help your organisation by working with you.

Rebecca Kaye is the co-founder of NUMBERTELLING, who will be at stand 93 at The Gathering.