Across sectors, data drives decision-making—but gathering the right information isn’t always easy. Many organizations collect data but struggle to apply it effectively or reflect the communities they serve. Creative approaches to data gathering can lead to more meaningful insights and better outcomes across programs, communications, and strategy.
Why Data Literacy Matters
The ability to understand and communicate data, also known as data literacy, strengthens decision-making, improves program effectiveness, and builds trust among stakeholders. Yet many organizations aren’t proficient. Sixty percent of nonprofit professionals don’t use data to make decisions, and one-third of respondents in S&P Global’s 2022 Voice of the Enterprise Survey say their companies only make data-driven decisions sometimes.
Common Barriers to Meaningful Data
A range of barriers creates challenges to effectively collect and integrate data into operations. In some cases, though, the biggest challenge might be trying to collect data that actually reflects the experiences and perspectives of the people you’re trying to serve. This challenge is especially true for organizations that work with or on behalf of hard-to-reach populations, such as people who are incarcerated or those experiencing homelessness. These factors are difficult to overcome, but not impossible if you’re willing to think outside the box.
Creative Approaches to Data Gathering
Implementing participatory and creative data-gathering techniques opens up opportunities to collect and apply data in ways that are more interesting, impactful, and representative. The following creative strategies for data collection and analysis can help you bring your data to life:
PhotoVoice
This approach deepens understanding of local issues by facilitating a community-based, participatory process of documenting, narrating, and collective meaning-making that inspires civic action and social change. This method incorporates photography and narratives gathered directly from those with the most relevant lived experience. Not only does this method provide data from community and stakeholder perspectives, the photos can be curated into digital or print exhibits that promote dialogue, encourage action, and inform policy.
Arts-Based Research (ABR)
ABR incorporates artistic methods such as creative writing, visual arts (e.g., drawing, collage, video-making), or performance art (e.g., theatre, music, dance) into the data collection process. Integrating arts mediums can be especially useful if you’re exploring a sensitive topic, seeking insight on subjective experiences (e.g., program participation or service delivery), or working with linguistically diverse or differently abled populations. These approaches result in audio-visual content that can make your research, reports, case studies, communications strategies, and evaluations more dynamic.
Community Mapping
This approach invites community members and stakeholders to identify and articulate the relationships between community variables in a sequential manner that often helps to break down larger constructs into tangible elements, such as the connection between housing and education outcomes. There are several mapping approaches that can provide data on a range of factors, including community strengths and assets, capacity and resources, relational dynamics, and personal experiences with systems. The data gathered during mapping often produces dynamic visualizations of information that can inform decisions related to strategic priorities, partnership development, program design, process flows, budget allocations, and policy.
On its own, data is just information. When creatively packaged, your data becomes a tool for action. Adopting creative approaches to data gathering for documentation and decision-making can transform the way your organization leverages data. While traditional methods such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups produce critical findings, creative research techniques can widen the scope and strengthen the depth of information available to your organization. Not only will you gather more powerful and nuanced data, you will expand your options for communicating information to your board, funders, partners, and key audiences in diverse and memorable ways.
Need Help Designing a Creative Data Assessment?
We can help you gather, analyze, and communicate data in ways that reflect the communities you serve and drive real impact. Reach out today to explore what’s possible.
