Pro Bono OR in the Third Sector: February 2023

Monday 20 February 2023

Charity Excellence Framework: what lies beneath

Project summary

Critically review a large database and how its data is used, to advise on whether the system, the data aggregation and outputs are doing what is intended, and suggest improvements.

Project description

The Charity Excellence Framework is a free resource for charities, with around 36,000 charities currently signed up as users. It enables charities to assess themselves on a set of criteria relating to key dimensions of their operations (eg fundraising, governance, communications) in order to help prioritise action for improvement; and it provides links to thousands of free resources that they might wish to use to help them with those actions.

More information about how this works is here.

The charity self-assessments are held on a database, which currently has 350,000 data points. The primary output is the dashboard for each individual charity, which helps them view their own data. However CEF has a ‘master dashboard’ aggregating all the data and is planning to enable multiple versions of master dashboards that can support policy-makers and umbrella bodies who are responsible for decisions covering the whole charity sector.

CEF would now like:

A critical review of the system, to see if there are an issues and advise on possible improvements (this is at the level of logic, process and data analytics, not coding).
Advice on how best to aggregate and explain the data so that it provides valid, reliable and useful output that can be safely used by any external organisation.
The volunteer should have the competence to undertake database review and to advise on analytics relating to large volumes of data, and be experienced in designing analytical output that will meet the needs of the end user.

How will this project benefit the organisation?

The project will either (a) give CEF the confidence that they can make the master dashboard available to all comers without risk of misleading; or (b) demonstrate what changes need to be made before this can happen.

Location

Remote

Commitment

CEF will be pleased to have however much external expert input is available, whether hours or days or a long-term peer-support commitment.

This project may benefit from having a mix of volunteers with different experience around systems design and assurance, and analytics. When applying, please indicate what would suit you best, or call us to discuss.

Desired project start date

Ideally as soon as possible, no firm deadlines.

Desired project completion date

Ideally as soon as possible, no firm deadlines.

Apply

If you feel you are able to offer your assistance please complete the application form and return along with your CV to ProBonoOR@theorsociety.com by Monday 6 March 2023.

The OR Society fully supports equal opportunities.

Information about the organisation

For further information about the Charity Excellence Framework, please visit https://www.charityexcellence.co.uk/

Information about Pro Bono OR

For further information about the Pro Bono OR scheme, please visit: www.theorsociety.com/Probono or email ProBonoOR@theorsociety.com

Monday 6 February 2023

Using data for insight, understanding and change

Project summary

Enabling Contact to make the most of their data to influence and improve services, campaigning, and fundraising.

Project description

Contact supports parents and families who care for a disabled child with a variety of services and through work directly with policy-makers. They hold a considerable amount of demographic data on service users (in particular: parent ethnicity; child age; and child disability/condition), which is not currently fully analysed.

The volunteer(s) would be asked to work with the charity to:

- Prioritise the questions to be addressed by analysis

- Undertake suitable analysis, present the findings in an accessible way, and discuss their implications with the Monitoring and Evaluation team

- Provide tools and documentation so that some or all of the analysis can be undertaken routinely by the charity themselves in future years.

Investigations may include, for example:

- Which groups are currently under-reached by some or all of Contact’s services. This may help identify actions such as how best to design or market service to reach new users. (For example, one strategic aim is to reach families sooner, so the data on age of child will help understand how well different services attract younger families.)

- The needs of different user groups (there is coded data on issues raised by individuals, for example in helpline calls), and possibly inequalities in experience of public services, for example across different ethnic groups. This will help to inform campaigns; evidence future funding bids; and improve service design to meet needs of different groups.

- To identify research questions that cannot be answered by the data, but that Contact may want to investigate further e.g. through qualitative analysis.

The volunteer(s) should be experienced in planning and carrying out analytics to answer operational and strategic questions. Other desirable experience includes:

- Ensuring that some or all of the analysis can be reproduced by the charity on updated data in future years (depending on which tool(s) the analyst wishes to use, this might be code or documentation).

- Understanding and managing the risk that disaggregating data results in users being identifiable even though the data is anonymised.

Geographical analysis of the data is not a priority for the client, but knowledge of GIS will be a nice-to-have additional skill.

How will this project benefit the organisation?

Contact aims to be the charity that families turn to for advice and support when they find their child has a disability, to drive social change, and to enable their user families to shape their work. They feels that at the moment the data is an under-utilised resource, and that this project will enable them to make the most of it, to inform the design and management of services, to influence decision-makers outside the organisation, and thus to improve the quality of lives of parents and families and their children.

Location

Remote

Commitment

The client would like to have at least part of the work completed by summer 2023, to feed into discussions of a new strategy.

This may be a project that will suit two or more volunteers working as a team, though it can also be undertaken by an individual.

Desired project start date

February or March 2023

Desired project completion date

Summer 2023

Apply

If you feel you are able to offer your assistance please complete the application form and return along with your CV to ProBonoOR@theorsociety.com by Monday 27 February 2023.