Jake Porway of DataKind kicked off Stanford Social Innovation Review’s second annual Data on Purpose conference yesterday by joking that the event was “so much better than the conference I spoke at yesterday – Data by Accident.” Jake’s joke wasn’t (just) flippant – it actually spoke to the conference’s underlying theme, that the nonprofit sector must approach, use, and leverage data carefully and ethically.
Over the course of the day, speakers focused on “telling great stories with data.” Sacha Litman and Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic demonstrated practical ways to visualize data effectively and ethically, Lucy Bernholz of Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab previewed the resources of the lab’s new digitalimpact.io site, and Cheryl Phillips shared powerful stories of data journalism. A well-balanced panel of representatives from Guidestar, United Way, and Habitat for Humanity discussed how to leverage data in program, development, and outreach efforts: “no stories without numbers; no numbers without stories.” And the day ended with a stirring appeal from Andrew Means of Impact Lab, who argued that nonprofits have a moral imperative to use data to structure programming in a way that will do the most good.
Here’s a look at the #DataonPurpose conversation:
