Data Working Group
The SIF data working group as produced a dashboard showing the geographic distribution of social investment in England, Scotland and Wales. You can view this below:
Overview
The SIF data working group exists to connect data teams within the social investment sector to:
improve data maturity within the sector, particularly on data capture and analysis;
share best practice between organisations; and
advance cross-sector data projects of shared interest as agreed by the SIF membership.
The group will be open to who anyone who works with data within their organisation, provided they are a member of the SIF.
Guiding principles:
SIF data working group aims to improve data maturity of social investment sector with a set of tangible outputs for design data / innovation data – goal to make the sector data use more efficient and effective.
Working group could take forward discrete projects put forward by members that are of shared interest but lacking internal resource. Based on how Data Kind works – members of working group identify projects to take forward, resource is obtained (if needed), and volunteers mobilised to help work on project delivery where possible. Outputs would be shared / freely accessible to SIF members.
Working group activities
SIF data working group activities cover three areas:
Learning events: facilitating sharing of information or new data initiatives / projects in the sector. The SIF data group could set up short learning sessions to share these findings across the sector more widely. This could be done on an ad hoc basis, if there are particular projects that members would like to share. There is also the opportunity to host more focused events as agreed by the working group.
Data projects: given limited capacity across teams to undertake significant external data projects, the aim would be to start from a position of what is most useful and least resource intensive. An initial idea is to run a ‘quick and easy’ data pull across SIF members to understand the geographic spread of investees in the UK and link this to strategic areas for the Government (i.e. Levelling Up Fund priority areas / Red Wall constituencies) to demonstrate the role that social investors can play in the levelling up agenda. This would feed into SIF advocacy work ahead of the Spending Review / Autumn Budget.
Cross-SIF collaboration: there will be opportunities to collaborate with other working groups within the SIF where there is a particular data need or ask. For example, the Future Needs working group will be surveying the product needs of customers and this will require some data crunching. Similarly, the EDI working group may need support with analysing diversity data relevant to that workstream.
Contact
If you’d like to find out more about the SIF data working group and its current activities, please email the secretariat will.thomson@sibgroup.org.uk