Why is it so common for an organization's data to be disorganized?
It's common for an organization's data to be disorganized because the people collecting it are busy doing the work the data is meant to describe. Staff in nonprofits and community programs are delivering services, supporting participants, reporting to funders, and keeping the organization running, often with limited time and resources. Keeping records consistent, combining them across programs or years, and analyzing them are specialized tasks. Many organizations don't have an evaluator on staff to do them.
That's one reason organizations bring in outside help. An evaluator's working time goes to designing ways to gather information, cleaning and combining data, analyzing it, and interpreting what it shows. A program team that has spent its time on participants and daily operations is in the same position as many organizations that contact an evaluator for the first time.
What can an evaluator do with data that isn't clean or organized?
An evaluator can do a great deal with data that isn't clean or organized, as long as that work is included in the scope of work. That can include cleaning it, combining records that sit in different places, analyzing it, and helping you understand what it shows. A practical starting point is to look at what you already collect, such as attendance and participation records, intake forms, applications, and surveys you already run. The evaluator can then identify which of your questions that information can already help answer.
Once they're familiar with your data, an evaluator can also help you decide what to change going forward. That might mean keeping some records the same way, collecting something you haven't been tracking, or dropping a survey nobody uses. Whether you need new surveys at all is its own question, and Do we need new surveys, or can we use what we already collect? looks at it in detail.
What should we tell an evaluator about our data before we sign an agreement?
Before you sign an agreement, tell the evaluator honestly what state your data is in: what you collect, where it's kept, whether it has been cleaned or analyzed, and what's incomplete. Cleaning and organizing data takes time. An evaluator may plan and budget the work expecting a clean dataset on the first day. If they learn after the agreement is signed that the data will need to be cleaned first, the scope and the budget will have to be adjusted.
Sharing this early lets the evaluator design an evaluation that fits your situation and plan enough time for organizing the data. It also helps them tell you which of your records are likely to be most useful. The work can then begin on your questions, without the scope and budget having to be revisited after the agreement is signed.
The Grantibly perspective
Angelika's perspective
We certainly won't judge you for the state of your data. We don't expect you to have it in order, and few organizations do. You're busy doing the good work you do every day, and rightly so. Organizations bring in people to do the kinds of work they don't do every day, especially data analysis and organizational improvement, because they aren't evaluators.
We want clients to see evaluation as a source of information rather than a judgment, and we should never make evaluation sound like one more thing you're failing to do correctly. Our job is to help you make sense of the data you already have and collect the data you need. From there, we help you learn what's working and where the opportunities for improvement are, make improvements, and share what you have accomplished. You're in good hands.
