Discover how to tackle complex problems with these six key practices for social organisations
We’re in the social sector because we want to make a difference and tackle tough problems. To truly understand what services or solutions work best for which people and when, we need to gain insights. These insights help us to improve our practices and achieve better outcomes.
But practitioners can’t do this on their own - they need the scaffolding and support of their organisation to equip them with these insights. If you lead a social organisation, there’s a lot you can do to build your organisation into an “Insight-Driven Social Organisation”.
It's about more than just collecting data - it’s about fostering a culture where insights drive every key decision with the beneficiary in mind and where data supports ongoing service innovation.
Here are six key elements that define an insight-driven organisation:
1. A Detailed and Nuanced Understanding of the Client (Beneficiary)
Social organisations should deeply understand their clients and beneficiaries. This means going beyond surface-level data to gather detailed, nuanced information about their needs, preferences and behaviours. By utilising advanced analytics and qualitative research, organisations can develop a comprehensive client profile that informs all aspects of their work.
For example, one social organisation asks clients about their wellbeing at the beginning of their journey and periodically over time. This approach enables the organisation to track changes in overall wellbeing across eight core areas:
Standard of living
Health
Achievements
Relationships
Safety
Community
Future security
Life as a whole
Another organisation asked us to develop a more nuance segmentation model of their service users to help understand which clients with what backgrounds were more likely to disengage early from their service, helping to adjust and tailor interventions.
2. A Culture That Prioritises Insight Over Instinct
Many decisions we make are based on gut feeling and instinct, which can be fine in certain situations. However, without a strong fact-base, it's hard to consistently make good decisions or apply common approaches across large cohorts.
Social organisations need a culture that values insights from both practice wisdom and data and research. This requires training and encouraging staff to seek out and use data-driven insights in their daily work, making informed decisions based on evidence as well as experience.
To help our clients boost their organisation’s data maturity, we take groups of frontline staff and executives through a learning and development 'Data Journey'. This journey covers data literacy (how to read and use data) and building the protocols and systems to support and govern data. Over time, a culture of inquiry, innovation and data use strengthens as these data leaders engage their teams.
3. A Challenger Mindset and Willingness to Disrupt
Being insights-driven means constantly questioning the status quo and having the courage to disrupt established norms. This challenger mindset involves looking at problems from new angles and being willing to implement unconventional solutions. It’s about fostering a culture where innovation is not only welcomed but expected.
For instance, a not-for-profit in the education sector might regularly review traditional teaching methods and implement new, data-driven techniques to improve student engagement and learning outcomes. The data collected might go beyond the traditional skills and competencies measures and encompass social drivers and needs such as relationships, motivation and learning history. By challenging conventional methods, they stay ahead of the curve and continuously improve their services.
4. Distributed Decision-Making and Co-Creation
In an insights-driven organisation, decision-making is not confined to the top levels of management. Instead, it’s distributed across the organisation, empowering teams to co-create solutions. This collaborative approach ensures that insights from all levels are considered, leading to more holistic and effective outcomes.
When practitioners have the confidence to collect and use data, they gain the power to initiate change. A team that is close to a program’s participants can spot issues with the program logic or service model early (‘hey have you noticed this thing we do doesn’t seem to get traction with our current cohort?’).
With dashboards and analysis tools in their hands, that team can quickly implement a new method and use data to test its impact. This continuous improvement cycle, informed by data, can radically increase the speed of innovation and service improvement.
5. Constant Innovation and Learning That Inspires and Engages Others
In our work, we see one of the most powerful uses of data is to move from high level one-size-fits-all programs, to programs that use more nuanced data about individuals to better triage, match and tailor services to small groups with common needs. Our experience demonstrates that every program has a range of different needs and contexts - sometimes the standard service model works well for 80% of the cohort, but 20% miss out. With data that helps segment groups by need, practitioners can refine service models on the fly and then share the ‘what works’ data back with the organisation.
To enable this continuous experimentation with what works, the organisation needs to put in place the data infrastructure and provide data empowerment tools in the hands of team leaders and practitioners.
6. Proactive Governance and Ethical Decision-Making
Finally, an insights-driven organisation uses proactive governance and ethical decision-making. This means using data responsibly, ensuring privacy and security and making decisions that align with ethical standards. By prioritising ethics, organisations build trust with clients and stakeholders, ensuring that their insights lead to positive, sustainable outcomes.
Data governance can be seen as one of those ‘boring’ administrative tasks. It becomes yet another compliance and risk management activity in a long list of constraints.
Our experience is that when governance is developed alongside data literacy (skills and confidence) and useful and practical data tools (such as dashboards and apps that directly help with decision-making), it becomes useful and embedded in the organisational culture.
The traditional approach to data in the social sector has been top-down, where frontline practitioners spend lots of time collecting data that they never use, in order to serve the compliance machine that the funder puts in place.
When data flips to become about staff empowerment, the reason to collect and govern data suddenly has a purpose. This then builds trust within the organisation and also with the communities they serve.
Becoming an insight-driven organisation involves more than just systems and box-ticking. It requires a holistic approach that includes a deep understanding of clients, a culture of evidence-based decision-making, a willingness to challenge and innovate, distributed decision-making, continuous learning and ethical governance. By embracing these principles, organisations can use their insights to drive meaningful change and achieve their mission. But to do all this, you will have to lead your organisation on a journey.
*adapted from a Deloitte framework
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