Chances are, if you work in the nonprofit world, you’re all too familiar with the perennial problem of having a million things you’d like to do and not nearly enough resources to do them. Not enough money, not enough staff, not enough time. Enter shoestringing: managing the resources you do have in ways that produce the most effect in the least amount of time.
Being efficient with resources is an art and science - and it’s a key skill for getting things done in the nonprofit sector. Not only is it a must for your organization, it’s increasingly a must for foundations and grant-makers looking to get more strategic with their giving in the shadow of the economic recession.
A hot topic amongst tech and data heads these days is mapping - in this case, broadly defined as visualizing the relationship a data set has with the physical world. Since some estimates say 80% of all data can be connected to a point on the ground, we’re talking about A LOT of stories and trends we may be missing by not tuning in to our data’s spatial component.
So how does mapping connect to organizational resource efficiency?
Here’s how. Mapping can help your organization:
*Understand where to focus resources & efforts for maximum effect
*Predict where need for your services will be located in the future
*Communicate your work’s impact, to board members and the public
*Support more informed decision-making
Here’s an example: imagine a land trust has a set of great location data about each stream system in their county and some biological survey data for each. By mashing those two data sets together - physical and descriptive - they could create a density map to find and communicate the highest priority areas in which they might want to focus their activities.
A raft of new tools in the tech world are coming together to do exactly that. The best part? Many of them are free and exceedingly easy to use.
Take Google’s brand new Fusion Tables. By uploading your data to a platform similar to GoogleDocs, you can create a number of basic maps and charts with one click. But what’s really innovative here is that (if you choose) you can both share and mash your data together with thousands of others uploaded by the public - thereby extending your ability to collaborate with other organizations. What if that land trust had the stream location data but another organization had the biological data? Fusion Tables makes a collaboration fast and easy. And free. Check out this post for a deeper look at Fusion Tables.
A similar tool - also free - is the ManyEyes platform. Like Fusion, ManyEyes lets you upload your data tables via Excel spreadsheets - and create maps with the push of a button. The difference here is that ManyEyes has more map styles to choose from and full user interactivity. Once created, you can share your map easily by copy-pasting the provided embed code to your blog or website. Go here for a deeper look at ManyEyes.
On the supply side, data from any number of fields is beginning to get offered, openly and for free, online. A few data goldmines are the White House’s new Data.gov and Recovery.gov - as are the Lucile Packard Foundation’s Kidsdata.org (for children’s issues) and Green Map System‘s series of maps tracking sustainability resources in over 400 cities around the world.
What excites me is that these tools are practically made for grassroots organizers. They’re free, they’re collaborative, and they’re really easy to use. And, by embracing these kinds of tools, nonprofits could really begin to use today’s increasing flood of data to tell their stories more effectively.
