Transcript
Karl
There’s a quote from Gordon Moore who used to run Intel. And he said, ‘Every organisation has a map of the world, at which they’re at the centre of the universe.’ And people often sort of think about their own data, and they don’t think about how they compare with anyone else’s. So I think a starting point for our data is that you need to understand trends in your sector. You need to understand how it’s changing so that, first of all, you can situate your data against what is happening more widely. That might lead you on to thinking about things like benchmarking. So if you can find other organisations that are very similar to you in terms of their business model, or in terms of the area of the sector that you focus on, you might start to compare and think, OK, well, are we doing things as best as we can? Organisations, I think, especially need to understand about trends in their sector. I think our data is especially valuable in thinking about what are the really long-term, big-picture trends, and how can we prepare for those? Another quote that I’m really found of is William Gibson, a futurologist who says, ‘The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.’ So some of our data that we have got for different bits of the sector, that might be your data in three or five years’ time. So using that data to try and build up your business intelligence, your sense of where we’re going, I think is especially critical.
If you want to use data to help you understand your organisation, I think one of the first things that you can do is actually have a look at what sort of data is available. So data about fundraising, for example. We know that some organisations use our data as part of fundraising bits. They might be doing needs analysis, or they might be trying to think about who else is operating in an area. And our data will help them understand how many other organisations are doing that. I’d really like people to be able to use our data to understand their organisation by benchmarking themselves against it. And we are trying to get better at producing data that people can then find those benchmarking type clubs, or similar organisations. But it’s not always as easy as it should be. So we’re on a bit of a journey in terms of that.
I think the final thing I would say here is that it never ceases to surprise me how difficult people find it to understand our sector. We talk to media all the time, we talk with civil servants, and we’re a foreign country. Old people tend to understand the words charities and volunteering. And people in government and the media, they still find it surprising, for example, that charities contract with government. They still find it surprising that charities employ nearly 800,000 people. So yes, it might be about understanding your organisation. But I’ll tell you what I’d love people to do. When you’re at a wedding, or a christening, or something like that, and people ask you about working for a charity, use our data to explain to people what the modern voluntary sector looks like.