Uses Overview

Your Current Stage

Emerging

• Collect more data than required by legal/funders/ contracts.
• Most data collection and analysis relates to capturing activities, measuring outputs, and basic financial analysis and forecasts.
• Rewards mostly around improved understanding of clients and ability to articulate the scale of activities delivered.
• Raising income and understanding fundraising performance likely to be key focus for additional data collection e.g. contracts, and sales, fundraising events, donors, grants.
• Able to feedback information to funders, partners and networks around specific projects/services and the scale of activities. May struggle with multiple and or/repeat service use data.
• Starting to explore the difference between outputs and outcomes.

The next stage up for your organisation is

Learning

• Collect data to be able to understand and evidence the types of clients/ needs and problems the organisation addresses. Uses both internal and reliable external data sources to do so.
• Starting to use data to understand different ways clients initially contact and engage with services over time (or not).
• Able to demonstrate activities being delivered for specific types of users across a range of projects and services.
• Capturing some outcomes data and learning to measure outcomes consistently.
• Starting to capture feedback, monitoring and evaluation data on service/product quality and performance to inform improvements.
• Use data for income generation and some forecasting of sales and donations leading to more effective fundraising and commercial income.
• Starting to lead conversations with funders and partners using data.
• Building internal knowledge and expertise based on the analysis of data and dialogue on how to act on this.
• Strategic planning, particularly around efficiency and service development, is becoming more data informed.