#data philanthropy

[changecampus-blog-blog]

The Puzzle: NGOs and other mission-driven organizations are faced with an onslaught of decisions on how to best collect, analyze and visualize the data that will help them make the world a better place.

[datalab-blog]

Lucy Bernholz on how Global Pulse and others are practicing a new kind of philanthropy,

when big BIG DATA companies (telecomms, search engines, social networks) donate their public use data (privacy rights protected, opt in only) to a data commons.

She writes,

If foundations really valued data as an input, they'd rethink their grants management departments. These data experts wouldn't just deal with compliance issues, they'd be unleashed on relevant external data sets that matter to the foundation's program strategies. They'd be let loose to map, crunch, remix public data sets, peer data sets, industry data sets that would be used by program officers to develop their funding strategies. Grants management isn't just compliance, its strategy and learning. They'd partner with program and evaluation staff to make teams with data, domain, and grantmaking expertise, as well as appropriate external networks to assess and validate internal ideas. They'd be part of building the learning cycles and tools that would keep the grants meaningful and the foundation catalytic, not just compliant. They'd lead the charge in re-inventing evaluation at foundations, a process that data, shared data systems and data software will accelerate.