We ran a Datawise London Cohort 8 month long programme designed to help small charities and community organisations learn how to better use data to shape services and influence change during 2020 / 2021.
Divided into 5 stages – Discover, Learn, Analyse, Shape and Repeat, the programme ran over 8 day-long monthly sessions giving participants the time and space to learn new skills, meet peers and focus on working through their own data hunches and goals.
The monthly sessions were comprised of technical skill building and collaborative workshops to encourage peer learning. The content was shaped to a large extent by the goals set by the participants for themselves and by the 'hunches' they had identified and wanted to explore. This co-production approach lent flexibility so that the programme could be customised for maximum benefit for the participant organisations.
The cohort participants were also encouraged to access the wider Datawise London training programme and Data Talks series.
Mentoring
As Datawise London is a partnership programme we had the luxury of lots of experts to call on to both deliver training sessions and to provide mentoring outside of the programme to the cohort participants. Each participant was paired with a mentor from one of our partner organisations to help them achieve the goals they have set and to provide some tailored one to one advice.
Monitoring progress
In order to help participants monitor their progress throughout the programme, we worked with Data Orchard to offer participants the chance to use their Data Maturity Assessment tool. The Data Maturity Framework identifies 7 key themes and 5 stages to help organisations gauge where their organisation is on their data maturity journey, benchmark against others in the sector, and identify areas for improvement, by using the Data Maturity Assessment tool.
Participants then used the Data Maturity Assessment tool again at the end of the programme, and then one year later, to help them track their own journey.
Makerble, another Datawise London partner at the time, provided us with a platform to enable participants to track their progress, share resources and post tips.
How Superhighways used the Data Maturity Framework
Find out more about the the Data Cohort programme, use of the Data Maturity Assessment and resulting outcomes:
- Using the Data Maturity Assessment with a cohort of organisations - Data Orchard blog post
- Advancing data maturity in a cohort of organisations - Data Orchard blog post
In this video, Superhighways talks through how they used the Data Maturity Framework in their data cohort training with small charities.
Current training
Thanks to Trust for London, Datawise London lead, Superhighways, runs regular data training for charities and community organisations in London.
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Contact
Datawise London is a partnership led by Superhighways at Kingston Voluntary Action.
If you are interested in finding out more about the project and its resources or would like to share your own data ideas and challenges please contact us.