How much ‘good’ you do as an organisation is dependent on understanding the people within your community – whether they’re patients, tenants, donors, citizens – and being able to react quickly to their needs and expectations. Your data should be the difference between having a surface-level understanding of those needs, and offering solutions that get to the heart of the issues your community is facing, delivering real benefits to the people that need you.
However, as we explain in our guide, Data for Good: A guide to enhancing your organisation’s social impact with data, this will only be the case if you have the robust data management and high data quality needed to facilitate better insight, decision-making, analysis and automation. With poor data quality or sub-par data practices, you could end up doing more harm than good – but get your approach to data right, and there are a whole host of benefits you can offer your community to improve their experience and enhance your social impact.
Here are just some of the ways our community-focused clients have used data to improve their service and social impact.
Self-service portals
If you can rely on your data to be accurate and up to date, you can introduce self-service portals that empower your community to update their own information, manage their own interactions with your organisation and access services in their own time. It’s more efficient for your organisation and more convenient for your community.
Support and protection
Every organisation listed above has a responsibility to protect and support the people within its community. Yet with such vast numbers of people interacting with these organisations, it’s too easy for information to fall between the cracks or for red flags to go unnoticed as information moves between departments, particularly if that information doesn’t seem ‘critical’ in isolation. Just look at high-profile cases in Housing Associations recently, where opportunities were missed to protect individuals thanks to poor information flows throughout the organisation. Good data helps you to offer the right support and protection based on the ‘big picture’ surrounding each individual: a complete golden record that presents the full truth on every member of the community.
