However much our culture pushes a narrative of the rugged and brilliant individual, the reality is learning is a communal endeavour.
Barking and Dagenham Giving has always been committed to being as open and transparent about our work as possible. We think this is an important part of our work as a local funder, helping foster trust and allowing for meaningful decision-making to take place. In addition to benefiting our own learning, we want our community to better understand the impact we are having on the borough.
That is why we are pleased to announce the launch of our new impact dashboard. Here, our Head of Systems and Impact Cameron Bray discusses the steps we have taken to get here, and what this means for BD Giving going forward.
Why share our data?
It has long been our ambition to increase the data we share and make it more accessible. As a participatory funder, we think that access to information helps the decision-making process. While it is vital to know where our money goes, the participatory element of our work means we have to consider how it ends up where it does.
Data helps people identify where the charity’s resources might best be placed to deliver the impact residents want to see. It gives participants a chance to learn and develop their decision-making while also celebrating the successes that their decisions create. Through this, they get a first-hand experience of seeing how money can be used in the borough. This opens up the door for them to actively engage in innumerable decisions at every level, from where they save their money to submitting evidence to the council cabinet.
It is this combination of community interaction and data that gives participatory grantmaking its distinct flavour. When it comes to participatory grantmaking, data should not be a map but a compass. Communities need the freedom to take whatever path they feel suits them best. It may not be the most direct route, it may be a new route that carries more risk, but as long as they have their compass they have the tool they need to stay on track.
So how are we understanding our impact?
As a charity, we are trying to answer three key questions which form somewhat intangible concepts. To help make them more tangible, we use a range of measurable data as a proxy to help us understand our overall impact:
Are we creating new opportunities?
- We count how much money we bring into the borough (or the value of non-monetary resources);
- We count each grant and investment we make as a new opportunity;
- We look at the themes and location of what we fund, to ensure new opportunities are available across the borough.
Are we making Barking and Dagenham a more participatory borough?
- We track how much agency people feel they have when they work with us by using surveys and interviews;
- We count the number of times a person engages with us as we hope to see people returning and getting more involved;
- We map referrals into our work, since we see this as an indicator that people are encouraging others to participate.
Are we impacting the borough in an equitable way?
- We look at overall number of people we reach across all of our work;
- We monitor the different demographics within the people we work with, to ensure we represent the borough’s diversity;
We use the 360Giving DEI Data Standard to get an understanding of how equitable the people and organisations we fund are.
Becoming a data-informed funder
Taking part in 360Giving’s Data Champion programme helped me map out a plan for creating a data culture at BD Giving. Since then I’ve been on a ‘drive to data’ that had three stages:
- I developed a data strategy, thinking about what data we already have, what additional data we might need, and how we would go about presenting it.
- Once I had this, I designed a dashboard within our CRM to present the data to the team.
- Once I was confident that our internal dashboard was showing what the whole team would find useful, I started designing a version to go on our website.
This had to be easy to use and safeguard people’s data so I went with Flourish, which I had been trained to use on the 360Giving programme. When the first draft was complete, I held some focus groups with residents to get their feedback on the data they would find most useful, and the best way to present it.
While we will continue to publish annual reports, this dashboard will be regularly updated with our latest data and insights. We think this approach will help ensure decision-making within and about Barking and Dagenham is well informed.
For me, the whole exercise has been illustrative of how interconnected we all are, and how much we benefit from sharing knowledge. As Sir Isaac Newton wrote, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” (a sentiment that has become tied to money by being put onto the £2 coin). However much our culture pushes a narrative of the rugged and brilliant individual, the reality is learning is a communal endeavour. In addition to 360Giving, I’m particularly grateful for the output and resources of ELBA, Data to Viz, Datawise London, and Doogal for giving me the confidence to develop and launch this dashboard. It’s a first step and I can already think of a million ways to improve on it and I’d welcome a million more.
I hope that this data and our experience publishing it will be useful to other funding organisations as an example of good practice around funding data. It might feel scary but I would say that an opaque landscape is even scarier – if, as funders, we are serious about changing systems then we need to get more comfortable opening ourselves up to comment.
