Unpacking surveys with Tutors United
Nicole Holgate, Communications & Community Manager at DataKind UK
Salma, Programmes and Impact Coordinator at Tutors United
Collecting feedback is tricky - analysing what it means can be even trickier. Salma Begum of Tutors United came to us when she needed help making survey responses into clear visuals that her team and stakeholders could easily understand.
Salma is Tutors United’s Programmes and Impact Coordinator, and gathers and analyses lots of their regular feedback. Tutors United runs community-based tutoring programmes for UK primary school pupils from low-income, migrant, or refugee backgrounds, who live in social housing. Demonstrating the benefits and positive impact of their work helps them to maintain and build relationships with housing providers, grant funders, corporates, and local authorities, ensuring they are funding support in areas where children need it most.
As well as monitoring academic improvement, Tutors United also surveys pupils and their families throughout its programmes. It’s key to their mission that they help as many children as possible, not only with core subjects like Maths and English, but also by boosting their confidence, resilience, and independence in learning. However, this feedback is very diverse, and can be both qualitative and quantitative, so it’s challenging to process and analyse.
Part of Salma’s role is reporting using this (sometimes messy) assessment data, and she knew it would save her team’s time to standardise their approach. She wanted to develop her analysis skills, and chose to use Power BI to visualise the data, even though it was a new tool to her. By building test visualisations, she could streamline more qualitative data into consistent templates. This would make it more accessible and objective for her team to analyse, and easier to share with their social housing clients, strengthening these important relationships.
Salma began talking to DataKind UK’s Data Science & Impact Manager, Caitlin, about the project, and soon knew she’d come to the right place:
“I really enjoyed working with DataKind on this project! When I approached Caitlin for support, I had no idea how to use Power BI or visualise data in an effective way. I was lost, confused, and Power BI seemed very new and intimidating to me. Caitlin really understood my needs and took the time to create a project suitable for my development in understanding and visualising data using Power BI as a tool.”
DataKind UK matched her with expert volunteer Alan to help her work through the project over a month. The one-to-one support was ideal for her learning style, and she was also able to develop her confidence:
“Alan was amazing at explaining things at a beginner level, but also challenged me to use a different skill set to build the dashboard. He was very encouraging, motivating, and had lots of patience and understanding of my level. Power BI no longer seemed too intimidating to me, as I went from knowing nothing about the tool to building a dashboard for my team in less than 10 hours!”
Salma now feels confident to share the analysis approaches with her team, with the hope of incorporating it into their ongoing work and seeing where they could further improve analysis methods for the team. She also feels much happier about her data analysis skills, and gave glowing feedback of her own:
“I would love to work on future projects with DataKind UK, learning more about data and how to analyse, visualise, and unpack it effectively for the organisation. I would 100% recommend DataKind to other organisations as they are equipped with the volunteers, skills, and knowledge to help you with your data challenges. I cannot thank DataKind enough and I am so glad I was able to access their support!”
