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Embarking on a data journey with Nene Park Trust

Nene Park Trust
Find out how we've been working with the leadership team at Nene Park Trust to help them get the most out of their data.

Organisations collecting and using data is nothing new. However, the scale and volume of data creation has transformed in recent years. In 2017, the Data Never Sleeps Report 5.0 found that 90% of all the data in the world had been generated in the previous two years alone. The pace of technological and behavioural change means that the world of data continues to evolve beyond recognition.

It’s against this backdrop that Nene Park Trust, the charity that looks after Nene Park in Peterborough, set out to understand how to make better use of their own data. Unlike tech giants like Amazon, Google or Airbnb, the Trust is a pre-internet era organisation, meaning that managing this volume and complexity of data is a new challenge.

We worked with Nene Park Trust to help them understand how to combine their passion and expertise with the power of data to deliver their ambitions for the people and wildlife of Peterborough.

Beginning with data maturity

When the charity first got in touch in December 2023, we had recently refined our Data Maturity Framework. This is a tool we developed to help organisations assess their data maturity, find opportunities for improvement and support the development of a cohesive strategy. The Framework consolidates our learnings from large-scale data transformation projects across central government and the third sector.

Our work with Nene Park Trust began when we facilitated a data maturity workshop with their leadership team. We used our Data Maturity Framework to begin to explore data practice and maturity across each element of the Trust’s data landscape:

  • The data lifecycle

  • Insight and decision making

  • Tools and systems

  • Skills and ways of working

  • Responsibility and ethics

Data Maturity Framework

Our Data Maturity Framework, which we went through with Nene Park Trust in the workshop

The workshop prompted a holistic look at the charity’s ways of working with data, taking into account the entire data landscape and the connections between various parts of the organisation. 

We learned that information is created and collected across the park in many different ways and at different levels in each team and department. We heard that the way data is held ranges from paper to Excel spreadsheets to CRM reports - and even tally charts on whiteboards. It was clear that Nene Park Trust had an abundance of data at their disposal, but that extracting and acting on these insights wasn’t yet happening at a strategic level.

The leadership team collectively plotted the Trust at 2.5 out of 5 on our data maturity scale, recognising that they had a good foundation to build on, but still had some way to go in achieving the full potential of their data.

Finding a path through

Data touches every part of an organisation, so deciding where to start can often seem overwhelming. Our initial data maturity workshop uncovered many potential lines of enquiry, so knowing where to start felt daunting.

To guide the leadership team through this challenge, we took a case study approach. This meant applying the Data Maturity Framework, end-to-end, for one topic. This allowed us to interrogate various aspects of data maturity within a clearly defined problem space, making the work feel less intimidating whilst retaining a holistic perspective.

We used Nene Park Trust’s Impact Monitoring Framework as our entry point, which is designed to monitor the Trust’s contribution to a series of impacts. We chose two of these impacts to look at in more detail:

  • Improved community cohesion and social integration: Nene Park Trust lets everyone experience and enjoy our greenspace and activities together

  • Improved public health and wellbeing: Nene Park Trust helps people feel better

Georgia And Nene Park Trust’S Leadership Team Mapping Their Impact Framework

Georgia and Nene Park Trust’s leadership team mapping their Impact Framework

Understanding data through impact

For our next workshop, we used our chosen impacts as a springboard for identifying opportunities to improve data practice. We:

  • Used a theory of change structure to break down each impact into outcomes and assess the effectiveness of the indicators currently used to measure those outcomes.

  • Mapped as-is ways of working for each impact, recording how data is created, collected, made sense of, engaged with and shared.

Working through these exercises with the leadership team uncovered some crucial lessons:

  • Nene Park Trust’s strategic aims are broad and sometimes beyond the organisation’s control, making it challenging to understand what the park can achieve. For example collecting data on how the park improves public health and wellbeing is challenging.

    This means: Nene Park Trust have the opportunity to revisit their strategic impacts to ensure they form part of an achievable, and measurable, theory of change.

  • Nene Park Trust gathers data against lots of indicators, sometimes in ways that are manual and time-consuming. These indicators are not always relevant to improving service delivery or measuring strategic impact.

    This means: Nene Park Trust can assess the value of their current indicators in understanding progress towards impact and informing service design and delivery - with the aim of removing indicators which are less useful and developing new ones where there are gaps.

  • There are examples of good practice at a project level, but at an organisation level data isn’t always used to inform strategic decision making. Project reports are rich with data, however they are not widely shared or accessed as they are developed for specific projects and funders.

    This means: Nene Park Trust have the opportunity to learn from and codify good practice within the organisation and use this to redesign ways of working and join up systems to drive data driven decision making.

  • The responses Nene Park Trust gets from visitor surveys are not representative of the communities who they know, anecdotally, are attending the park. Therefore the current data collected doesn’t provide an accurate picture of the true visitor engagement.

    This means: Nene Park Trust can strengthen their visitor data by exploring new approaches to data gathering, including in-person data collection and user-centred research methods.

  • Nene Park Trust’s data is held in multiple different formats, systems, tools and spreadsheets across the organisation

This means: Nene Park Trust can better understand data and joining it together across end to end user journeys by developing data standards and linking or centralising information where possible.

What’s next?

Through this work, we have given Nene Park Trust a blueprint for understanding their data maturity and identifying, testing and implementing opportunities for improvement. 

This approach can be applied to discover new ways of working with data to design and evaluate services, projects and activities which deliver real impact for the people and wildlife they serve and preserve.

Adrian Oates, Head of Fundraising at Nene Park Trust, said about the project: 

“TPXimpact helped us understand in depth our data maturity level and expertly guided us through some of our impact data framework to question why we are collecting certain data, and how we can improve our monitoring practices. The workshop in particular was really useful to open our eyes to data methods that we have never really questioned before, and have just done it because that is how we always did it. The learnings from our work will help to inform our organisation-wide data strategy work going forward.”

If you want to hear more about understanding your data maturity you can reach out to Georgia Hill, Sarah Fox and Jessica Ferguson. 

Jessica Ferguson's avatar

Jessica Ferguson

Senior Partner

Contact Jessica
Sarah Fox's avatar

Sarah Fox

Senior Service Designer

Contact Sarah
Georgia Hill's avatar

Georgia Hill

Senior Impact Consultant

Contact Georgia

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