‘Data is the new oil’

This is the opening line we use in our training sessions on data driven decisions at CLIC Sargent. Data, just like oil, needs to be processed for it to be valuable. This is the job of my team at CLIC Sargent. We are tasked with shaping our supporter (and other) data into insight and business intelligence. We are also responsible for managing how and when we contact our supporters in order to help maintain long term support for the charity. This data drives our fundraising and decision-making and is vital to the success of our charity.

Last year, I was offered the opportunity to undertake the Data Fellowship, an 18-month apprenticeship training programme, funded by our corporate partner Societe Generale. This course takes people working with data and turns them into qualified data scientists. It offered the chance to access cutting edge tools and approaches from within data science, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as learning to code in some powerful programming languages. It was an exciting (and daunting) opportunity to take data analysis to the next level, and one I couldn’t resist. This is because not only would it be an opportunity to develop my own skills but it would also allow the charity to improve how it processes and uses data to generate insight.thanks

18 months later and the Data Fellowship has been incredible. It has had a huge impact on me, my team and the organisation. It has ignited a new way of working, using programming to achieve things we could have never attempted without the skills and knowledge we have gained through the course.  

For me the course transformed my practice. It allowed me to understand how computer-programming works within an entire eco-system and changed the way I think about what is possible with our current systems. My understanding and confidence in all things data, from databases to programming, has increased massively. This gave me the confidence to go for my current role as a team leader.

Within the team we have seen a huge impact. There are now four of us who have completed, or are on, the Data Fellowship and it has totally opened up the breadth of things we can achieve. The main barrier to answering almost any question is no longer skill but time. It means we have been able to take on projects such as developing PowerBI dashboards with big data as well as building detailed and dynamic forecasting tools. Regular training sessions have been set up to disseminate the skills and techniques we have acquired throughout the rest of the team. The Data Fellowship and the opportunity it offers has also made our team more attractive to join, which has led to us recruiting some excellent new team members.

There have also been some fantastic benefits for CLIC Sargent as a whole organisation. Perhaps the most important has been the way it has fostered cross-team working. We got to know people across the organisation who were working in data, which has opened up lots of doors for collaboration. Together, we have developed and delivered training by combining our knowledge to share with other teams. Ultimately though it has enabled us to answer some of the key questions that we are trying to answer as an organisation, and has taken us one step closer to becoming a truly data-driven organisation.

On our first day of training for the Data Fellowship they told us we were about to take our first step into a much wider universe. This couldn’t be truer for me. Through gaining new skills and knowledge, I feel like many barriers have been removed in the world of data and I can now zoom off in any direction I want.