Using Data from Many Streams to Drive Social Impact

The Bay Area chapter of the United Way (UWBA) is part of the largest private charitable organization in the world, and one of the leading poverty fighting organizations in the Bay Area with a stated goal of cutting poverty in half by the year 2020. UWBA doesn’t attack the complex problems underlying poverty single-handed, but instead serves as a catalyst by collaborating with local agencies, government and corporations. The high degree of cross-agency and intra-agency collaboration means UWBA must deal with disparate data from a range of sources while simultaneously developing intuitive tools that can be used to monitor change, track key indicators and facilitate discovery of patterns/trends leading to new insights. For these reasons UWBA embraced business intelligence, reporting and built a data users group as it migrated to a data driven organization. Over the past 3 years, UWBA has vastly improved its ability to identify key insights, drive action and communicate impact to donors, partners, and internal team members. This presentation will demonstrate how UWBA uses BI software and automated reporting to measure progress, empower collaboration and support decision-making across a broad audience. While highlighting UWBA’s new data driven culture, this session will walk through some key successes including: How UWBA creatively connect desperate messy information in once place; How UWBA built various “non-techy” dashboards to support the work of programs, development team, board members and community partners for a range of projects including community data library, program dashboards and organizational strategic planning.