Whether you’re part of a nonprofit that offers educational programs or a healthcare organization delivering life-saving care, you collect a lot of data. Contact details, event attendance data, and service delivery metrics are just the beginning. To generate positive outcomes for clients and participants, you not only need to collect essential data: You need to put it to good use.
That’s where data maturity comes in. Let’s discuss what it means to be a data-mature organization and why it’s so important for your long-term success.
What does data maturity mean for nonprofits?
Data maturity refers to the sophistication of your organization’s data collection, management, and analysis processes. Typically measured by a data maturity model, a nonprofit’s level of data maturity indicates the extent to which it uses data effectively in its day-to-day operations and decision-making.
When your organization is highly data-mature, you can efficiently collect quantitative and qualitative data and use it to make better decisions about your programs. This process involves analyzing two types of program data:
- Outputs: The raw data points you collect from programs or services, such as the number of people served or the number of sessions an individual attended.
- Outcomes: The conclusions you draw from your outputs, such as decreasing food insecurity in your community by 5%.
Although you may start by optimizing your output collection process and gradually work your way up to measuring outcomes, both kinds of metrics are essential to data maturity.
Benefits of being a data-mature organization
Along with improved decision-making capabilities, reaching a high level of data maturity gives your nonprofit the following key benefits.
Better understanding of your programs
When you collect relevant data and draw accurate conclusions from it, you’ll give your entire team valuable insight into your programs’ successes, challenges, and opportunities for growth. Data maturity provides a more accurate picture of your work on both a program and individual level, helping you identify specific changes you can make to improve outcomes.
For instance, analyzing a client’s self-reported depression levels from before and after they used your organization’s mental health services will give a case manager a better understanding of how they impacted that client. Additionally, diving deeper into the client’s qualitative data may provide insight into which strategies helped the client most and how you might refine them to drive even more positive outcomes in the future.
Greater ability to demonstrate impact
Accurate, comprehensive data is essential to both understanding and demonstrating your programs’ real-life impact on participants. With compelling impact data, your organization can improve donor relationships, cultivate public trust, and so much more.
Data-mature nonprofits easily prove the outcomes of their work and report on program impact to key stakeholders like:
- Current funders: Any organization that receives grant funding (whether from a corporation, foundation, or government entity) knows how important reporting is. The sophisticated data management and reporting processes associated with high levels of data maturity will help you satisfy grant requirements and maintain good relationships with your current funders.
- Potential grantmakers: When searching for new grants, you must consider the reporting requirements of each grant you apply for. Will you be able to meet those requirements with your existing resources? Does the funder expect a higher level of data sophistication? Win more grants by demonstrating your ability to generate detailed, compelling impact reports.
- Individual supporters: Grantmakers aren’t the only ones who need to see proof of your impact to continue supporting your nonprofit. Donors, volunteers, corporate sponsors, and community members all want to know what results your organization achieves and what they mean for the wider community.
Beyond grant reports, you can share this valuable impact data in your annual reports, personalized email updates, direct mail appeals, and social media posts to boost your organization’s credibility.
More time for service delivery
Part of data maturity is having efficient, streamlined processes in place for collecting, managing, and analyzing your organization’s data. This typically involves implementing new software and data management practices that make it easier for your team to handle data.
When your staff members don’t have to waste time sorting through duplicate data or solving communication errors between teams, they’ll have more time to focus on what matters: delivering your organization’s services and achieving positive outcomes.
For instance, say your nonprofit switches from paper intake forms to online forms that automatically add responses to your database. This change could save your case managers hours of work on a weekly basis, allowing them to devote that time to their clients instead.
How do you increase your level of data maturity?
Every organization has a different level of data maturity, from those at the counting outputs stage without established data processes to nonprofits that easily manage their outcomes. Wherever you are right now, you can take steps to improve.
To increase your organization’s data maturity level, follow these steps:
- Implement sophisticated tools for data collection. Paper forms and disparate spreadsheets will not serve your organization’s data needs in the long run. Depending on the types of data you need to collect, implement tools like case management software or a unified constituent relationship management platform (CRM) that will enable you to input, store, and consolidate important data points.
- Identify the most essential information for your programs. Next, determine exactly what data points you should collect. Choose specific, relevant outputs and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each program that you can analyze long-term. These might include the number of participants served, the number of supplies distributed, etc.
- Practice drawing conclusions from your data. Once you have relevant outputs for your programs, you can start translating outputs into outcomes. Use your software to pull detailed reports on program data and analyze trends. By putting all of your data into perspective, you’ll be able to draw conclusions about your impact.
- Use those conclusions to make short-term decisions. Finally, after measuring outcomes, you can use that data to make better-informed decisions.
Of course, successfully taking all of these steps requires a solid understanding of data privacy and hygiene best practices, as well. Keeping your clients’ data secure is paramount to putting that data to use. Ensure that any system you implement has robust security standards, and institute internal policies to safeguard sensitive data.
Increasing your organization’s data maturity is a lengthy process, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results right away. Any step in the right direction is a major achievement that will drive your nonprofit toward long-term success.
