Analytics and Data Use
We believe in the power of data to improve the human experience, and there are some specific ways we help organizations better leverage their data to advance their work more equitably.
First we believe a strong data governance practice is essential to using data equitably and appropriately in an organization. Data governance is shared decision making and power around data collection, democratization (accessibility), privacy, and appropriate use. We created a course with the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy to help organizations better understand the importance of data governance in the public sector and how best to establish and grow an equitable data governance practice.
Read more about the relationship between data governance and equitable data practices in this blog post. You can download our Data Governance Business Case as a guide which you can take to your leadership to get support for your Data Governance efforts.
Take our course!
To support organizations in creating or growing their data governance practices, UPD partnered with the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy to offer the online course, Data Governance for Public Decision Making.
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Additionally, UPD supports organizations by assessing the equity of their practices around data, either as part of a larger equity assessment or in specific assessments and coaching around particular equity questions. Read more about our data equity assessment and coaching work with three state workforce agencies as part of the Data for the American Dream project.
UPD also supports targeted equity metric development work through a well-honed and defined data use case development process. Our clients have hired us to help them clarify and align as a team on what equity questions they actually want to answer using data, which data need to be collected to get them to their answer, and how they will use those data appropriately and productively to advance their equity goals. Our facilitation of this work requires organizations to share power with their stakeholders in their metric work. One example is our nationwide economic mobility use case facilitation and design project for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.