Making Space for Data That Drives Decisions

Ana Ranković
23 hours ago
4 min read

Welcome to Making Space, our newsletter for nonprofit leaders navigating the real and challenging work of becoming more data-driven.

In this issue:

You're collecting better data. Now what? How to turn a strong CRM into real insights and compelling stories
Join us for a conversation with the Chinese-American Planning Council on building a data-driven organization
Awesome Nonprofit of the Month — Finding Common Purpose

Let's get into it.

Olivia & Charles from North Arrow

Moving from data collection to data-driven intelligence

The Problem: Many nonprofits have done the hard work of improving their data collection with better intake forms, a new CRM, and cleaner records, but still lack the tools to actually make sense of what they’ve gathered.

Getting better data is a real achievement. But for most organizations, that's where the momentum stalls. The data sits in expensive software or in a sprawl of spreadsheets, and teams don't have a clear way to pull insights from it, spot patterns across programs, or show funders and policymakers what it all adds up to. The question shifts from how do we collect better data to what we do with it now that we have it.

So where do you start?

The Solution: Start with a map. Take your program locations, member addresses, and service areas and plot them against the public context that matters for your work – poverty rates, language spoken at home, school performance, immigration status.

The good news is that the public context data is largely freely available at the census tract level — reach out and we’ll show you where. The question is whether it’s sitting in a government database or actually being used by the people who need it.

Once you have it, a simple map of your programs or beneficiaries — layered against that public context — becomes a tool your whole team can use to answer the geographic questions that come up constantly: Which members live in this council district? What does our footprint look like in neighborhoods we want to expand into?

These are the questions that derail advocacy meetings and funder pitches when nobody can answer them on the spot. The goal is to have this data readily available to anyone on your team.

You don’t need to start with a super sophisticated data tool. But starting somewhere is the difference between real intelligence and good record-keeping. One organization that went all in

One organization that went all in

The Chinese-American Planning Council is the largest organization in the country serving Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, with over 80,000 members across New York City. It’s worth saying upfront that CPC has the resources to build something most nonprofits can't replicate wholesale. We're sharing their story as an inspirational picture of what's possible, not a bar to clear.

CPC migrated to Salesforce, redesigned their intake forms, and built consistent data collection practices across programs spanning early childhood, workforce development, immigration services, senior care, and civic engagement. The data was there — what they needed was a way to illuminate it.

CPC partnered with North Arrow to build an interactive platform layering public data across 30 indicators, eight legislative geographies, and their own member database. Any team member can now understand which communities CPC is serving and how that picture shifts depending on the legislative boundary they're looking through. A program director weighing a new contract can analyze CPC's footprint in relevant districts in real time.

The tools stay current automatically through a real-time connection to Salesforce — no manual exports, no quarterly refreshes. And on the public-facing side, CPC's membership map and interactive impact tour let funders, elected officials, and community partners see exactly where and how the work is happening.

Read the full case study here, and tune into our upcoming conversation with CPC leadership to learn more about the journey from their perspective!

🎙️In Conversation: Nonprofit Data Leaders a chat with CPC, May 5th at 1PM EST

Hear from the leaders behind the work! We are starting a series of conversations with nonprofit executives who are paving the way for data excellence within their organization.

Wayne Ho (CEO) and Edgar Pereira (Chief Program Officer) of CPC will share the story behind the work — what it took to build the data foundation, the obstacles along the way, and what it means for an organization like CPC to finally be able to see the full picture of who they serve.

May 5th at 1PM EST - SIGN UP HERE -

🦄 Awesome Nonprofit of the Month - Finding Common Purpose

Finding Common Purpose is a funder collaborative with a simple but radical premise: to solve big problems, you need to fund the data insights, not just the programs. Their mission is to help communities define success and publicly track progress so that funders, institutions, and residents are aligned and working toward the same outcomes.

We've partnered with them to build community dashboards for coalitions and nonprofits nationwide, fully funded by the foundation. For the launch of their new website, we visualized one of their key outcomes: using data from the Urban Institute's Mobility Metrics, we built a map-based dashboard showing the decline in wages relative to the cost of living across the country. The dashboard makes clear the urgency of FCP's work: across almost every county in the country, wages aren't keeping pace with the cost of living.

Explore the map and see their vision in action at findingcommonpurpose.org.