BUILDING A COMMUNITY DATA ECOSYSTEM IN AUSTIN

 
 
 
 

From Mission Capital and Social Solutions, informed by conversation with Alison Bentley, United Way for Greater Austin; Eva Rios-Lleverino, Capital IDEA; Meme Styles, MEASURE; and Sierra Randall, Foundation Communities.

Data is a powerful resource that community-based organizations can analyze to illuminate areas that need attention and shine a spotlight on changes that can result in greater impact. More broadly, data is central to understanding what’s really happening in our communities. But to be used effectively, data needs to be easily accessible to staff throughout organizations and must be regularly updated.

Here, we explore what challenges community-based organizations face related to accessing and analyzing relevant data, why building a community data ecosystem will help inform and improve programs, and how we can band together to make a community data ecosystem a reality.

Alison Bentley, United Way for Greater Austin, from panel discussion “Data Equity: Leveling the Playing Field through Community Collaboration – Austin.”

THE LATEST CHALLENGES

The perceived value of data and analytics greatly increased during the global COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, society at large is employing more digital tools to help us do our work and live our lives, and the nonprofit sector must dive even deeper into the world of data to keep up.

To serve our communities, our customers, our staff, our volunteers, and our partners, we must lean into this transition and become more aware of the opportunities and risks within our local data ecosystems.

Yet, we are faced with challenges unique to our sector. And while it is extremely valuable to gather real-time insights, predict scenarios, and solve problems before they arise, the artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that make these outputs possible present additional challenges.

BARRIERS TO ACCESS

Community-based organizations are on a dedicated mission to nourish their community culture and empower positive local change. However, the demand and pressure for smaller, local communities to be more data driven without the support necessary can be disempowering.

Our sector is routinely underfunded and understaffed, which means we can be slower than others to adopt new technologies, we can have a lack of data infrastructure, and we can have issues with data quality.  

Further, smaller communities or those with fewer resources can be even more siloed from the data ecosystem. Not all data is publicly available or systematically shared with everyone, and even when data is publicly available, it can be difficult to discover and interpret.

Meme Styles, MEASURE, from panel discussion “Data Equity: Leveling the Playing Field through Community Collaboration – Austin.”

EQUITY

Our sector has been complicit in reinforcing inequitable structures, and gatekeeping around data work has often contributed to that inequity. Data can be used to uncover and highlight inequities as well, but the systems for data collection, analysis, and dissemination must be more equitable and accessible. 

Artificial intelligence and machine learning also have significant implications for equity. Data can be a powerful tool to drive positive change, but biased data can also compound existing inequities at scales we haven’t seen before.

FRAGMENTED SYSTEMS

The fragmented nature of Austin’s data ecosystem often means that service providers, advocacy groups, and local stakeholders do not know where to go to request or access data or to receive technical assistance to interpret and use that data.

 

UNDERSTANDING

We aren’t exposed to concepts like artificial intelligence and machine learning every day, and we certainly don’t understand them well as a collective group. We need to deepen our understanding of these concepts so that we can work to avoid recreating and deepening the inequities we have in our society.

Collective understanding and collaboration is required to help overcome all of these challenges.

Meme Styles, MEASURE, from panel discussion “Data Equity: Leveling the Playing Field through Community Collaboration – Austin.”

MEASURING MINDFULLY STUDY

In 2018, Mission Capital, with funding from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, conducted a community needs assessment around data called the Measuring Mindfully Study. The assessment's purpose was to help get an initial understanding of needs, challenges, opportunities, and assets around data and data-related activities in the Austin region.

We learned that there were many challenges for nonprofits to effectively use data to drive impact. Organizations needed:

  • Alignment in the larger system and with powerful stakeholders.

  • More financial resources to collect and use data.

  • Better internal processes and cultures to do data work.

  • The right technologies to do data work effectively and safely.

  • Help and support in planning data work.

  • Access to specialized skills and capacity to do data work.

  • Ethical and reliable processes that support trust in data and data-driven decisions.

  • Data that is more useful in making decisions and achieving goals.

These challenges were not magically solved before the COVID pandemic. While the landscape has changed, many of these challenges still exist today.

THE CASE FOR BUILDING A COMMUNITY DATA ECOSYSTEM

A data ecosystem is a collection of infrastructure, analytics, and applications used to capture and analyze data. In the context of community social good, a data ecosystem can often mean a myriad of different systems that track the demographic, service, and outcome data that is collected on an individual or family as they are receiving social services.

When a community member inputs their demographic information into an online portal to request services or enroll in a program, they are participating in the community data ecosystem. When frontline staff at community-based organizations accept those new clients and begin tracking the services they are delivering to that client, they’re also participating in the community data ecosystem. When organization leadership or funders request some of this information to assess the efficacy of the programs they are running or funding, they too are participating in the data ecosystem.

As the social good sector continues to digitize, we are seeing an increased appetite for connecting systems efficiently, impactfully, and equitably to inform and improve programs.

Eva Rios-Lleverino, Capital IDEA, from panel discussion “Data Equity: Leveling the Playing Field through Community Collaboration – Austin.”

AN EXAMPLE OF A PURPOSEFUL COMMUNITY DATA ECOSYSTEM

First 5 Riverside County is a multiservice child advocacy organization that invests in programs and partnerships that promote, support, and enhance the safety, health, and early development of young children, families, and communities in Riverside County, California.

In 2019, First 5 Riverside County took on new family resource programming from the Department of Social Services and needed a new way to effectively navigate case management and referral workloads. This led to the exploration of a new database system, which included taking an intentional approach to coordinate services around prevention, crisis intervention, and supporting families.

The agency’s data management system required considerable manual intervention, which led to data entry errors that made accurate reporting challenging. It would take multiple business days to review data and reports, slowing productivity. Additionally, their previous data system could not produce integrated views of a family across multiple services, limiting staff’s abilities to optimally assess client information. These challenges led to real impacts on the way services were being provided and the outcomes clients could achieve.

Social Solution’s Apricot 360 case management software simplified and streamlined First 5’s data processes, specifically creating a cleaner platform with greater ability to see false positives or errors. The organization saw higher quality reporting and extensive benefits such as front-end efficiencies with data entry. Its staff members have a much more streamlined workflow, as well.

Piera Causley, Regional Manager of Family Resource Centers & Resilient Families at First 5 says, “Apricot 360 is the connective tissue of data and reporting across the services we provide and fund. The work is moving so quickly in human services, so for us, it’s about building an amazing framework with ideas and vision, and we are able to create this with Social Solutions. They are a partner in how we’re evolving our work.”

HOW TO MAKE A COMMUNITY DATA ECOSYSTEM A REALITY

How can our sector do more to ensure data is more accessible, more equitable, and more useful to everyone?

Rather than getting the data “as far as it can go” and then asking community-based organizations to take it from there—knowing that many may not have access to the resources, technology, and human capital needed to leverage that data—data ecosystems need to be built not only with the ability to analyze and extract meaning from the data but also with an equity lens as a priority. This requires individual implementation at the community-based organization level to map the data as it goes in so that it comes out aligned to the organizations’ existing business practices. The problems that need to be solved at the organization level in order for a community-based organization to gain the ultimate benefit of the network aren’t always intuitive to the bigger project, but they’re paramount for true data equity.

Sierra Randall, Foundation Communities, from panel discussion “Data Equity: Leveling the Playing Field through Community Collaboration – Austin.”

RESOURCES

Let’s lean into equity and collaboration and build a public list of resources to help organizations on their data journey. Submit a data through our contact form. We will consolidate this list and share it back out here.

As a starting point, here are some resources we find valuable:

Mission Capital is a nonprofit that advances race equity and opportunity in the Central Texas social sector through personal transformation, community cultivation, organizational resilience, and ecosystem collaborations.

Social Solutions, which is becoming Bonterra, is the leading provider of cloud software for nonprofit and public sector social service organizations.