Building impact with care
By Suzy Mayel-Afshar, Head of Volunteer Programmes at DataKind UK
Image by THỌ VƯƠNG HỒNG from Pixabay
A look at what’s been happening behind the scenes at DataKind UK, and a sneak peek of what we’ve got coming up.
Like so much of the third sector, DataKind UK has recently faced funding challenges, and had to make difficult decisions about staffing and resourcing. Despite a huge need for data support, and a highly engaged, enthusiastic volunteer community, we are constantly having to figure out how to do more with less.
But we will continue to work in a way that feels authentic to us and the impact we want to have. In a world that constantly pressures us to do more, faster, our approach is to be intentional and respectful of people's time, energy, and skills, in alignment with our values of curiosity, responsibility, and collaboration.
Sustainable working
Ongoing feedback about our programmes was that our projects were too intensive, packing too much in a short time. We were trying to cram lots into a rigid programme, and spending a lot of time showing people how to work at our events, rather than focusing on building data capacity.
This limited the number of volunteers and third sector organisations we could work with. It also meant we faced regular ‘crunches’ where lots of intense activity happened at once, which didn’t feel sustainable.
This was creating a risk of burnout for volunteers and staff, and overwhelm and information overload for our third sector partners. It also favoured in-person events over online, and while we acknowledge that in-person events have an amazing energy to them that is hard to replicate online, we also want to keep things accessible for people who want to volunteer remotely.
To that end, we’ve been experimenting with some new events and projects, and redesigning our programmes to make them better suited to the needs of our third sector partners and volunteers, as well as us as a staff team. All of this will save us time in the long run, but has been intensive to implement.
Updated programmes
We’re now running a Light Touch Support offering, where charities get up to 10 hours of data support from one or two volunteers over a month, supported by our staff team. You can read about Salma’s experience receiving support from Adam.
We also trialled events that made project brief development a collaborative process. While we loved the close groups work, the outcomes were still a bit unclear, so we’re thinking hard about how we can incorporate the value of in-person gatherings like these into other projects and events.
Following these events, we’ve run two Exploring projects, and are about to kick off two more. These projects run with a team of 4-5 volunteers over 6-8 weeks following a tightly spec’ed project brief, with a kickoff meeting, midpoint and final session, followed by a retrospective meeting for the volunteer team.
This has massively reduced the financial and logistical burden of those events, while keeping the focus on building data science capacity for third sector organisations through our amazing community of volunteers. We will continue to iterate and make improvements to these projects as we learn from them!
More impact
We’ve also spent time updating and automating some of our internal processes, for example our volunteer application form and project support requests. And we’ve been amazed by how many volunteers have applied since we launched our new form - we’ve had around six applications per day!
So, we have been busy thinking about how we can best use the incredible volunteers in our community to support data science capacity building in the third sector, and we’re excited to announce a new series of workshops to do just that. This Building programme will need lots of volunteers to work collaboratively on creating and improving data-led tools that will improve third sector organisations’ data use, and access useful open data sets. The first of these will be focused on our internal data.
In September we also plan to restart our Community, Scoping, and Impact committees. We haven’t had the capacity to run our committees for a while, which is a shame, because we gain so much capacity and expertise from our committee volunteers, so we really need you back!
New - and familiar - faces
Internally, we recently recruited some new board members to help us to stay on top of our charity governance, finances, fundraising, reporting and all the other admin that keeps us going as a registered UK charity, as well as helping us to stay relevant and accountable to our mission. We’ll introduce them more properly to the community soon, as well as sharing a huge thank you to the outgoing trustees!
Finally, we’re building towards our first volunteer Annual General Meeting. This inaugural AGM in September 2026 will be a chance for our volunteer community to reflect on our progress and impact, give us input on the strategy and direction of the organisation, and it will of course also be a chance to come together and connect as a community.
So please keep your eyes peeled for more about all of these ongoing works in process. If you want to help us improve our capacity to support organisations to access data science, one of the best things you can do is to donate to us.
