We are all affected by data, what is says or how it is used, in some way.
Some of you might love data, some of you might not love it so much.
Regardless of how you feel about it, data is used every day to tell stories about our community. From the federal government to our local dentist, there is a lot of data about us out there.
Often it is not accessible to us but importantly it’s not always accurate about us. This can be for different reasons:
- Sometimes people might decide not to participate in data collection, or not answer truthfully.
- Sometimes the wrong story is told because the wrong questions were asked.
- Sometimes the wrong story is told because the wrong people were asked.
Data is in lots of things that you already do; It’s in the conversations and stories you hear every day, it’s in the things you already know about your community and the shared knowledge that is built up over time.
It’s in the numbers around you: Number of members to a group, number of people that came to your event, number of times you went to your doctor last year, number of birds you see when you look out the window
The term ‘data’ refers to any way of capturing all of these things so that you can share them with someone else.
In your business you might need to share information with another community organisation, your peers, your staff, your elders, and of course government when talking about policies and grant funding opportunities.
Why should we care about all this?
Whether we realise it or not, data is used in day-to-day business decisions.
For example, when you think about whether you are investing your efforts, finances and time into the right activities, you are already considering whether you think the things you expected to change are actually changing.
Often we might make this judgement from what we understand is happening around us in our everyday business, an overall sense or vibe, or our recollection of information over time.
More and more we are being asked to demonstrate evidence, or to refer to our evidence-based decisions.
Developing a Monitoring & Evaluation framework is one way we can capture change and demonstrate this to others including our funding bodies, in general government communications, and also with other businesses or service providers in town.