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One of our core values here at Inciter is Get it Done. When our clients email us, we email them back. When they have a problem, whether its a messy data set or help thinking through their data strategy, we show up. So when a client that is using our data system asked me the other day to build a form for them, my first thought was, Youve got it!.

Data Maturity Stages In Part I of this blog series, I introduced the concept of data maturity, its importance to organizations, and steps for becoming data mature. Today, well tackle the ways in which organizations can be thought of as existing in different stages of data maturity and how you may move through them. Particularly relative to reporting, knowing where you are on the data maturity scale will help you identify the right approach and the right tools to move forward.

I was introduced to the term data maturity by Karen Graham, Maddie Grant, and Jenn Taylor at their 2019 GoodTech Fest presentation. (If you dont know about GoodTech Fest, check out my blog post on it here and consider going in 2020! Its a great, reality-based conference about measuring what matters in the nonprofit sector.) Ive been thinking a lot about this idea of data maturity, and how we can help organizations build capacity to provide data for themselves and to funders.

Data integration isnt always a high tech solution. Sometimes, its more about just combining some new cutting edge tools, with your existing data management strategies, in order to create a system that pulls everything together. (And data systems can play well with others without having to tangle with any “playground bullies”, either.) One of our clients had a data integration challenge that we encounter almost every day. They were working with several partners to collect information about human trafficking victims throughout the county.

What is EYEO? EYEO is a festival held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. I say festival because it involves not only top notch international speakers, but also things like karaoke, playing with arts and crafts, trying out virtual reality experiments, and going to cool places like Aria and the Machine Shop. Its changed a bit over the years, as it featured more information visualization and interactive art speakers early on, versus more machine learning and artificial intelligence speakers in these last couple of years.

Inciter on the Road For the last few years Ive been looking for a conference where folks who love technology, data, and social services come together to talk about how to collect the right information to improve lives and change the world by finding better ways to collect and analyze data related to outcomes. GoodTech Fest is it. **What is **GoodTech Fest? GoodTech Fest is a conference for those doing real life, applied work in the social sector.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Getting Great Data Week. All posts on AEA365 this week are contributed by evaluators who came together to write about the theme of getting data that is accurate, timely and, most of all, useful. Our own Taj Carson contributed this timely post: https://aea365.org/blog/getting-great-data-week-how-to-have-great-data-when-people-and-technology-both-do-their-part-by-taj-carson/ We hope you’ll check it out and let us know what you think!

So you read the last blog post in this series, about asking the right questions of your social change efforts, right? (You did, right? We know it’s been a minute.) If you did, you know that there is just as much strategy involved in deciding what data you need to collect as there is in carrying out the strategy itself! Its one thing (and a very important thing) to know what you want to collect and why.

**Looking to measure your impact, communicate about it, and bolster your fundraising? We at Inciter can help you through research, visualization, and our new custom software, Incite. ** Inciters mission is to make it easy for nonprofit organizations and government agencies to harness data and use it to communicate findings to funders, stakeholders and staff. Inciter helps clients change the world by using data to tell the story of their impact, raise funds, and advocate for social change.