29. June 2018

Workshops

Our ProBono workshops equip NPOs with valuable resources and best practices. Topics include working with digital data, handling digitalization and digital marketing for their own good cause. They are free of charge for suitable organizations.

Our workshop in a nutshell

Our workshop is about sharing – knowledge and experience. As our expert team works with (digital) data on a daily basis, allow us to help you uncover hidden data treasures which can support you in reaching your goals. We identified five core topical pillars.

  1. website analytics – what are people doing on your site (e.g. Google Analytics)
  2. search data – what are people looking for, what does this tell you (beyond SEO)
  3. CRM data – how can you leverage the data you have on end users (GDPR-compliant)
  4. open data – which source can you tap into for additional insights
  5. online text data – listen in on social media and extract relevant information

Commonly there are two workshop types: an overview workshop, where we present an introduction on every topic, and a focused workshop, where we talk about 3 or fewer topics.

In an overview workshop, we set up a “gallery walk” with stations where we present a single topic with a short discussion. As the groups walk from station to station, they experience each data source for 20 minutes. During this time, we provide the objective of the data source, present several use cases to prove its benefits for the social sector, and discuss the needs and questions of the participants.

In a focused workshop, you will explore various data tools. These will allow you to analyse how your website is performing, how to identify areas of interest or key topics of your target audience or how to find platforms or important influencers that might be relevant to your communication strategy. The focus of our new workshop will be open source solutions for web analytics, online text data or search data, which are not only free to use, but also easy to apply.

Each workshop takes about 3 hours, and is followed by a chance to socialize with all participants, including our experts for more detailed discussions and an exchange of experiences.

As we do strive to make each workshop as interactive as possible, ideally you bring a specific issue or question that you have with you for us to discuss.

Workshop goals

Our primary workshop goal is simple: you should be aware of the power of data, and how you can use it to your advantage.

We achieved our goal when you leave our workshop with new ideas about analysing your dataset, or want to check out an external data source you were not aware of before.

Your benefits

After attending our workshop, you will have

  • learned about available data sources which can offer you additional information,
  • heard about best practices which should inspire you to evaluate existing data you collect,
  • a better perception how data can help solve your current issues, e.g. how and where to find new supporters, and
  • met peers and extended your network.

Come join us

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We offer our workshops for NPOs/NGOs that strive to bring positive change to our world. Participation is free of charge. Please understand that we may have to limit the number of attendees from a single organization to two persons, so we can create a balanced workshop group.

Previous workshops

Read about previous workshops in our blog: our initial digital academy, our second workshop at Impact Hub, and our focused data tools deep dive.

As wrap-up we asked for feedback and received a lot of positive reactions, like the answer from one attendee: “My expectations are exceeded. Data is not only theoretical, but practically applicable.”

What people especially liked and voiced during the wrap-up session:

  • The overall set-up of the workshop, the individual approach in small teams
  • The relevance of the data sources for their work, even though (as one participant put it) “in real life they run a mile when it comes to data”
  • The interactive format
  • The possibility to network and learn from others

But we also learned that:

  • although the potential of data for their work is huge, smaller organizations simply lack the resources to deal with data.
  • 20 Minutes is a tough timing to get in touch with a data source

Many of the participants would love the possibility to discuss their real-life cases with us. After getting an overview they want to dig deeper into the data sources most relevant to them and learn how to use them for their benefit. Especially web analytics and search data are of great interest in the social sector. One participant noted: “From my experience I know that the whole nonprofit area is very interested in Google Analytics and Google Adwords, especially in the basics to answer questions like: Who are my users, what are they interested in, and how do we get their attention?”

Selection of tools

For reference, here are a few tools and links that we discussed and presented during our previous workshops. We are constantly on the lookout for more free sources of data and information. If you come across one that you would like to share, please let us know.

  • Similarweb: Free report on any website or app
  • Google Trends: See how how often specific keywords have been searched for on Google over a period of time
  • TextBlop: Natural Language Processing with a sentiment analysis function
  • SciKit Learn: Machine Learning and analytics