An exploration of SAC’s Pioneering Role as a Data-Driven Social Enterprise
In social enterprises, data is more than numbers on a spreadsheet. Every data point represents a life, a story, or an opportunity for positive change. One of the most significant examples of data-driven social enterprises are animal welfare organisations. Each shelter attempts to collect the data of animals, its volunteers and also its day to day operations.
The existence of inherent data challenges at small-sized, social enterprises makes the prudent use of such data a difficult task for shelters. These challenges include those around data integration, standardisation and democratised consumption. The causes of these challenges are the usual suspects — Lack of dedicated resources to do data and a lack of a data-driven culture at the organisation.
However, in the field of animal welfare there are a few organisations that are making a conscious attempt to get the ball rolling. One such organisation that is redefining how data is managed at animal shelters in the U.S is Shelter Animals Count (SAC). To those who work in data at smaller-sized organisations, you would recognise the challenges SAC faces as being silhouettes of your own challenges. In this article, I provide a high-level focus on how SAC is evangelising the use of data through action.
Fundamentally, the data team at SAC recognises the importance of having a streamlined process of data collection, building the technology to make it as simple as possible and automated for non-technical shelter employees and providing self-service capability of using analytics to democratise a data culture within the animal welfare system of the U.S. Unsurprisingly, these are also strategies that work well for other small-sized organisations (for profit or not-for-profit).
This article would not have been possible without the kindness of the folks at SAC for agreeing to answer my questions, especially Samantha Hill (Director of Data & Technology, SAC). Samantha spearheads SAC’s vision of collecting, standardising and providing shelter data at a national level.
