3 Ways Data Science is Adding Value to Non-profit Organizations

Big data brings big bucks for enterprises. But, using data for good brings great value to help communities, nature, and people. Data for good is the public data available from the government and other not-for-profit organizations to analyze, find insights, and apply in real-time to resolve societal problems.

Hidden beneath unstructured datasets, there’s always a gold mine of insights that add great value to business decision making. Data science has many tools in its bag such as Analytics, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, etc. to dig this mine. No wonder, tech industries are investing billions in data analytics and its applications for futuristic Analytics solutions.

A survey carried out by Every Action finds that 90% of nonprofits indicate that they’re collecting data, but “almost half say they aren’t fully aware of the ways data can (and does) impact their work”.

Ramya Sriram, Kolabtree

Data Science for Not-for-Profit Organizations

Data science is a set of problem-solving techniques that add value to an organization’s decision-making.

Just like the commercial industries, there are various non-profit organizations as well, leveraging data science approaches for social good.

It helps them find investors on the fly along with completing tasks like issue grants and track efforts and investments.

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Making Data Analytics Easy with Visualizations for Not-for-Profits

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) released their 15-years of a dataset consisting of information about every dollar spent on pneumonia remedy research.

For years, they’ve financially aided many pharma research organizations to fight for the cause.

Data tells that the Gates Foundation has funded 55 grantees worth $269,544,744 in 2014 alone for Pneumonia-related projects/research and had so far funded 230 Pneumonia related projects.

We then did what we are best at – Visualized the data to draw actionable insights.

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The interactive Gates foundation data visualization brought us a few great insights that helped us track where the money was going and who was utilizing it the most.

• Path Vaccine Solutions, an affiliate of PATH, has received the most funding from the Gates Foundation to research pneumonia & pneumonia-related issues.
• John Hopkins University, Emory University & theWorld Health Organization are amongst the top five to receive the most funding from the Gates Foundation.

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Such insights can help NPOs track their investments followed by efforts of the grantees and put them to good use. It can also help to know which organization to fund for the coming years based on their activities.

3 Areas Where Data Science is Adding Value to NGOs

Gramener has been constantly partnering with not-for-profit organizations to analyze their data and explore meaningful insights. There have been cases where we automated the manual process and saved hundreds of hours. For this, Gramener has received the data science for social good award, for 2 years, consecutively.

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Data science can play a vital role in nonprofit organizations in the following areas:

Financial Analytics for Budgeting and Expenses

For non-profit organizations, funds are limited and equally precious. Failure of the project seems to be a bigger challenge than assigning money to an organization for a cause. To make sure that non-profit organizations are using their resources wisely, they need to streamline their processes. There is very little margin of wastage.

For example, if a non-profit organization funds a pharmaceutical company for drug discovery and the recipient is lurking online through a voluminous research publication for weeks to extract drug-disease-target combination, both time and money are wasted. Why not take a data-driven approach where all the patents and research publications are sorted using text analytics for pharma literature mining.

Using Analytics for Marketing NGO Initiatives

Marketing for an organization, which is supposed to bring minimum or no RoI is tough. So, how could such organizations receive huge funds to work for social good? However, in some cases, when it comes to receiving investments, volunteers knock on the doors but are they ready to invest in the target market, that’s the question. Data Science can help answer both the questions while finding the target market and make more effective grant efforts.

Analytics for Implementation and Monitoring of Schemes

Performance measurements are important for non-profit organizations to make decisions for further funding and investments. Data Scientists can greatly help with this. The right analytics and metrics can help identify the gaps in the organizations’ efforts and develop smarter strategies for the future.

Finally, we can say that Data Scientists not only keenly work with non-profit organizations to find patterns but also to attain a spiritual level of satisfaction by using data for good. Only then we can bring comprehensive and positive change to our world Data science not only help MNCs and profitable industry verticals to decode insights.

Some Analytics Use Cases for Not-for-Profits

Non-profit organizations or NGOs religiously leverage data from the government to run their initiatives. Gramener becomes their technical partner and helps them build analytics applications using our low-code analytics platform, Gramex.

Analytics applications can be simple dashboards, web applications, or automated insights platforms. Data science solutions for non-profit organizations can be classified in many categories such as health and nutrition, nature conservation, water and sanitation, education, gender equality, sustainable cities and communities, and many more.

Integrated command Center for COVID19

we collaborated with the Department of Health of a large Indian state. They wanted a 360 degrees view into the evolving COVID-19 situation in the state. Moreover, they needed the help of analytics to plan and deploy critical resources across the state. Here is the dashboard. Click on the GIF below to check out the full case study.

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AI-enabled Salmon Detection Web Application

This application was developed for NIsqually River Foundation in partnership with Microsoft AI for Earth. Earlier biologists were manually counting salmon species in the Nisqually River. Now, the salmon detection web app automatically counts the fishes by identifying their species through camera traps installed in the river.

This AI-enabled Image Recognition use case recorded 80% of potential cost-saving and reduced manual efforts from 100 hours to 20 hours. Check out the salmon detection web app and the complete case study.

Open Data Platform – India Data Portal

India Data Portal is an open data platform for journalists, researchers, and policy practitioners to access, visualize and analyze agriculture and financial services data. Thanks to a variety of pre-built visual templates, you can easily transform any data into insightful data visualizations.

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More Not-for-Profit and Government Analytics solutions

Check out our data science solutions gallery to explore more dashboards, web applications, analytics solutions and AI solutions. You can also check out specific analytics solutions for public sector organizations.

P.S: Follow us on Social Media (@gramener) for more data stories and insightful visualizations.