Data Collaborations: giving power back to the social sector

Secure data collaboration is giving social organisations the power to unlock sector-wide insights—without sharing sensitive data.

The challenge

It’s common in the social sector for social organisations to collect a large amount of data for their funders (governments or philanthropy) or for a third party (eg AIHW) and not get that data back in a useful format for their own insights.

In the modern world, data is power, and the sector can gain more power and influence by collaborating together on improving and gaining insights from the sector’s data. This has traditionally been very difficult to achieve, both because organisations in a sector don’t want their data to be accessed by other organisations (who may be both collaborators and competitors for funding), and the technical complexity of sharing data makes the process tricky.

Now Latitude Network along with its partners has developed a methodology that overcomes these barriers and allows for robust data collaboration on large datasets down to individual client level without exposing client data to other parties and keeping it secure and private.

A Latitude Network data collaboration is a project that enables multiple social organisations to combine their data in secure and anonymised way to generate new insights. A data collaboration can -

• Put the power of data back in the hands of social organisations as a group;

• Provide a whole-of-sector view to tell the ‘big story’ about the sector;

• Generate new insights for planning, advocacy and evidence to support funding applications

• Lift the data literacy of the sector

• Provide practical, useful best-practice dashboard tools in the hands of every organisation on an equal footing.

  
  

It’s not about sharing your data with other organisations

A big innovation in a Latitude Network data collaboration is that you don’t share your underlying data with other organisations in your sector or with your peak body - you provide it to an independent data custodian and analyst (in our case that's Latitude Network) that aggregates it and serves back interactive dashboards and insights to you and your peers.

No one else gets to see ‘under the hood’ of your data - they only see aggregated data for a whole group or organisations. But you collectively get the benefit of understanding the whole sector’s data, seeing comparisons with the average results from your peer organisations and enables your peak body to tell a wider more powerful story in advocating across the sector. You also get dashboards that allow you to analyse your own organisation's data for management and performance purposes. It's beyond benchmarking, as it allows for more focused analysis and exploring changes over time. In addition, it’s all de-identified data (contains no personally identifiable information as defined in the Privacy Act) so privacy risks are low.

Benefits to peak bodies & the sector

Your sector’s peak body or ‘backbone’ organisation is often key to a data collaboration as they can convene the sector together to do projects in the collective best interests of the whole sector.

• Provides a ‘State of the Sector’ report back to the peak body to analyse trends, gaps, needs and strengths across the whole sector

• Outsourcing the technical and analytics to the data custodian

• Provides a structure for sharing best practices between organisations

• Can help focus on the important questions that benefit the sector as a whole.

Is it right for your sector?

A broad-based data collaboration works best if -

• Are there many (usually 10 or more) organisations operating in a common sector or alliance?

• Is there commonality of mission or common outcomes goals and service areas or cohorts of people served?

• Are organisations already collecting data, even if not consistently?

• Does the sector have a leadership body or peak body responsible for advancing the sectors’ interests? Or does it have a common funder or philanthropic leader focused on addressing a specific issue or achieving a social outcome?

• Are there issues of common strategic interest that could benefit from evidence and advocacy?

If the answer to these questions is YES, then your sector could well benefit from a data collaboration. Even if your sector has tried data sharing projects in the past, this new approach with modern data management tools can address the barriers to success. The first step is usually to explore interest with a peak body board or key sector organisational leaders. Get in touch with us for a demo of other data collaborations we have developed to see if it might be useful for your sector or alliance.

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