Aligning Data to Outcomes: Our Approach to Developing a Thoughtful Data Strategy
Hawai‘i’s service providers have a wealth of insights on the communities they serve, and possess a deep understanding of the challenges families are faced with. However, with pressing community needs, limited budgets and time constraints, we have learned service providers are often challenged with a lack of data capacity.
Many of our partner service providers are exploring ways to meet the emerging post-pandemic needs of Hawai‘i’s families. Data has the potential to uncover new needs as well as identify gaps in community services that can shape the development of programs; it is also critical in evaluating the effectiveness of programs. Harnessing the power of useful data can be transformational, helping providers achieve better outcomes. We support service providers aspiring to become more data-guided and outcomes-oriented by helping them obtain the valuable data insights they need to make informed decisions.
Data Strategy Supports Your Mission
Whether it's providing health services to vulnerable kupuna in their homes or supporting keiki in classrooms, every organization can benefit from a thoughtful data strategy. Developed thoughtfully, a data strategy weaves data into an organization’s overall strategy and can be key to advancing your organization's mission. It identifies what types of data are important to your organization and how you will capture and evaluate data on an ongoing basis to adapt your services or programs. Over time, this approach to data can even shape your organization’s values, culture, and future strategic direction.
Developing Your Data Strategy
From our work, we have developed a basic model to help our partners better understand how data can be woven into strategy to deliver better outcomes. We offer the following guiding structure as a practical way for you to design and implement a thoughtful data strategy for your organization.
An Overview of Data Strategy Components
Our process for developing a data strategy consists of four phases, designed to assist organizations like yours seeking to continuously enhance their ability to gain, and act on, data insight.
Data strategy starts by first defining the Context. You can use available data to gain a clearer understanding of what is happening in the community and why. This supports (re)defining the challenge and laying the foundation for an action plan that will allow you to assess your impact over time.
In the next phase, Action, your task is to develop your theory of change for how your organization will respond to the challenge, and how you will know if your organization is making a measurable difference in the lives of those you serve.
The Evaluation phase involves assessing your program’s effectiveness and learning from the new data that has been collected.
Finally, the Adaptation phase allows you to integrate new data insights you’ve gained from your work to redefine the landscape, and Context, so that the process can begin again.
Context
What does the data tell us about what's going on and why?
Identifying the key components of an issue as well as any underlying or upstream factors that contribute to the issue is a good starting point. For example, you may want to look at how socioeconomic status, a lack of affordable housing, and access to mental health services contribute to, or exacerbate, the issue you are addressing.
You can begin the Context stage by asking yourself these questions:
What types of data will help me understand the issue my organization wants to address?
How well does existing data help my organization?
What data do I still need to better understand this issue?
The next step is to inventory available data on the issue and the upstream factors to create a data summary, which describes key trends and potential root causes. It is also important to note significant data gaps at this stage.
However, data only gives a partial view of the landscape. Combining the data with community insights and subject-matter expertise will give you a fuller picture of what may be occurring in the community. This will help you develop a clear challenge summary: data-driven statements that summarize your challenge.
Action
What does the data suggest we do?
Determining the data your organization needs is the next important stage. This will convert your challenge summary into a theory of change, with a framework that includes concrete steps to bring about change in your community. You’ll define indicators to assess your progress against the specific goals for all of the actions outlined in your theory of change.
Here are some questions for the Evaluation stage:
What were some of the outcomes we hoped to achieve from the implementation of our services, and to what extent did we succeed?
What was the impact across our programs?
What were some of the unexpected findings from our data?
Evaluation
What can we learn from our data?
Evaluation is an ongoing, iterative process that tracks whether your theory of change is working as planned and if your approach should be modified. Your evaluation is not the end, but a means to identify key lessons that can then be incorporated to refine your theory of change.
Here are some questions for the Evaluation stage:
What were some of the outcomes we hoped to achieve from the implementation of our services, and to what extent did we succeed?
What was the impact across our programs?
What were some of the unexpected findings from our data?
Adaptation
How can we apply our data insights?
The data from the Evaluation phase is summarized into key learnings to make real-time adjustments to your programs, and reassess the Context of the issue. These data feedback loops enable your organization to adapt to the evolving needs of the communities you serve.
Ask yourself:
What is the data showing about the community’s changing needs?
How can we make mid-course directional changes to our programs in real time?
How can we incorporate this new data and additional insights to redefine the landscape to better meet the needs of the community?
Data Strategy Resources
We strive to be a resource to support service providers in developing their data strategy along with the data capacities needed to enact that strategy. Please feel free to contact us with your questions at info@hawaiidata.org.
Additionally, here are some additional resources on theory of change (TOC) and monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) that we have found to be helpful:
Resources for further TOC exploration:
Resources for further MEL exploration:
