 Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar today, How to Use Data Visualization Tools to Track Social Change with Alex Pittman from Impact Mapper. So just a few items before we get started. So if you guys have questions throughout the webinar, there is a chat box on the left-hand side where you can ask your questions throughout the webinar. All callers will be muted. If you lose your Internet connection, just refresh your browser and login using the link that was emailed to you. If you are interested in watching the webinar again once it's over, it's going to be hosted on techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. Also, we'll be sending out an email with a link to the presentation, the recording, and any necessary handouts or links. If you're on social media, feel free to send us a tweet at TechSoup and you can use the hashtag TSWebinars. And like I said earlier, you can use the chat box as we go along if you have questions. So just a little bit about TechSoup. So we are located in 236 countries and territories. We have several technology partners that we work with. And because of their partnerships, we are able to serve over a million organizations. So just to take a quick break, I'm going to have you guys chat me where you are dialing in from and I can read a few of them out loud and this will give you a chance to use the Q&A box. So we've got Nashville, Tennessee, Kansas City, Austin, Texas, Great City, San Jose, so somebody sort of local. So we've got people calling in from all over the country, hopefully from some other countries as well. So now I'm going to go ahead and introduce Alex. So Alex is the founder of Impact Mapper. She has a PhD in Sociology and Cultural Psychology from Boston College. And she also had a post-doctorate position at Harvard University where she was researching the role of brand in international nonprofits and philanthropies. She has expertise in evaluating social change and impact and has run a successful consulting business since 2005 working with a range of clients in the international development and human rights and women's rights sectors from UN agencies, foundations, international NGOs to small grassroots groups in different countries. So I'm going to now hand it over to Alex. Great. Thank you so much, Seema. I'm really happy to be here with you all today. So I'm the founder of Impact Mapper. We're an online platform for donors and nonprofit organizations to track and visualize their social impact. The idea for this software product really was born out of the consulting work that I was doing in this space that Seema was just referring to. So I started my own consulting business in 2005 and had this amazing opportunity to work with a wide range of organizations all the way from different UN agencies to international NGOs, SOCFAM, all the way down to small grassroots groups in Morocco. So really getting a really large understanding of the field of space issues. One of the things that we found very early on was that there was tons and tons of data that was being collected. And a lot of this data was qualitative in format. And especially when we're thinking about changes in social justice work, human rights work, women's rights work, things that take decades or maybe even generations to transpire, quantitative metrics that we often rely on in our sector don't actually tell the whole picture in the story. When I was working with these organizations I would see there was massive amounts of PECS data and reports, very rich information about the social changes that are being made. But we just didn't have the easy-to-use analyst tool to derive learnings from that information. So when I was in a lot of these contacts and doing evaluation systems for foundations and nonprofit organizations, I would actually go and use maybe four different tools to get the job done. So I would go from the qualitative space and draw something like a Zivo to do my qualitative data analysis. If I was doing quantum analysis, I would go with SPSS or R. And then if I'm doing a survey, maybe use a tool like Survey Monkey and then use something like Tableau if I wanted to do data visualization. So I'm a data geek and a data lover. So it's totally cool for me that I realize I'm unique in the sector and not everyone is going to want to do that. So it seems there's a huge space in me to get more out of the data that we had in an all-in-one space organization. Another huge issue that I found in this sector in this work was that there's actually a lack of easy, inefficient data sharing between grantees or donors and any investors in our process. And we have technology and technological solutions that could be leveraged to help us make it simple and effective. And of course, we also have a lack of data transparency, where money flows go, and what the impact of that money is. And too often because of the project cycles and the funding cycles out there that are really often broken down into projects, maybe one year or two to three or grants, that's out of sync and out of whack with some of the longer-term change prophecies that we're trying to actually move towards. And so we're taking quantitative metrics and we're missing out on that rich nuance and the trends from quality of data. So really, this also is what we currently most often see in our world and our space. And this might look something so much familiar if you look at your own desktop. So you see many, many file folders, lots of Word documents, Excel, maybe surveys, pictures related to the different projects you're implementing or the portfolios that you're funding. Super, super challenging to lift this up and get a sense of what's happening, what are the trends, are you making progress, what's the impact, and what are the changes that are occurring. And so that's really where we come in. We developed this all-in-one software platform and tools to visualize or change, track those data trends, and to actually do storytelling and share the story that matters the most to your organization. So you give your data to us, oftentimes start with an Excel file that you might have on your grant making or your project you're implementing around the world. Get instant access to a beautiful data visualization that shows how you're funding or where you're working around the world. So if you're a donor, it will give you the total amount of grants, the grantees, the number of countries to work with, the total amount of money. If you're an unprofit organization, this would be the number of projects, the number of partners, and then the number of countries, the total amount of money that you've received. Super helpful to get that high-level picture of the work you're engaging in. The other thing we do is we make it very simple for you to automatically see, visualize key metrics that we know you already care about. So you don't have to go to an Excel and make the charts the things that we know you're going to want to learn about and talk about. So we break them down by region, we break it down by issue area, population, things that you have instant access to and don't have to waste time in this process. You can also drill down into this global map and get even deeper insights. So if you click on one of these countries, you can see the total amount of grants or projects being implemented, the total amount of funding, and those partners that you're working with in different countries. Super helpful, a lot of organizations using the product are using this, start off board meetings to get a high-level picture of where they're funding, where they're working, and then delve deeper into this in the next phase of conversation. Again, we also have this great tool where you can upload any documents, texts, and gain instant access to you. Insert your daily of change outcomes into our tagging editor and any reports that you have, interviews, focus groups you might have collected, and you can be text into a quantitative measure of grants. As you see something that's relevant to an outcome of interest, you highlight it and you click on the tag, and that gives it a frequency of one, and that starts to look good. We also make it really easy for you to lift up any data that exists in text and auto that, so that you can see the amount of trends as well, the text reports you have, all that information, then visualize, and can be explored in our chart generator feature. You can access each part of the chart. We have bar charts, staffed bar charts, horizontal charts, line charts, areas, pie charts, heat map, and bubble maps. Super, super cool. You have been working in Excel, and the pain of that, of making these little pivot charts along that takes to get them to look nice. Really, with a click of a button, you have beautiful visualizations that allow you to explore your data more meaningfully. You can also have a couple of different trends lines here, so maybe you want to see the number of projects and the total amount of percent of funding per project. You can do that. You can look at trends over time. This just gives you really an easy way to understand the data. All of this is also customizable. You can change the colors. You also can save this in a variety of different formats. You can save this as a .png file, a .jpeg, a .pds, poppies, and reports. Some of these are points that indicate the impact you are making to your donors. We also have built this wonderful ePager, which is our custom survey feature. It's so very cool for a couple of reasons. One, we're kind of because in some of the open-ended texts, you open-ended questions that you might want to care about into questions. So we allow you to, let's say you're implementing a project, a leadership project in a certain setting, and you are creating a survey, and you're going to send out to participants, and you have a question there, like, what was the most impact in your life after taking a leadership program? And you already know you care about a certain set of outcomes related to leadership. You can create that open-ended text, but also embed your outcomes in there so the participants can tag that to themselves. So what you do see is that you're just having multiple questions, open-ended questions. You're engaging in this participatory coaching process, which is really, really powerful and interesting in a space in this field that we're all working in. The other very cool feature that we have for our sector is the ability to link surveys and differentiatives, and most survey software products don't allow you to do this, which means that each survey is treated as a discrete unit. So there's a whole lot of data preparation involved in different surveys to the ISP files, putting them together, uploading them into some sort of data visualization software platform. So we solve that problem where you just click up a button. Hi, Alex. This is Seema. Sorry to interrupt you. We're getting some feedback from the audience that the audio is a little bit patchy. I don't know if there's any way to kind of maybe make it a little more clear. I don't know. I'm on my phone, and it seems like I have full coverage. I'm not sure what to do about that. Are you on your speakerphone, or is it? No. I'm asking using headphones. Okay. We'll let you know if there's a window that you can move closer to, but we'll keep an eye on it, and then we'll jump in again if it continues. Yeah, I'm really sorry. I'll do my best, and hopefully if there's questions. Okay, yeah. If you want to repeat some of the points at the end of the slide, that might help, but go ahead. Oh, no, no. That's a big issue. So we want to solve it. So hopefully the audio will come through, and this will work out for everyone. Okay, yeah. I'll jump in again if it continues. Cool. Thank you so much. Yeah, so basically you have all these responses in. Each of those responses are automatically visualized on our survey summary screen. So you have each question is represented on a card with the data summarized for you. If it's quantitative data, you can very easily go to the settings and see the main and median by just clicking a button, and the main and median lines will pop up for you. You can also see all of the raw responses per question if you click on it. And then, of course, there's great information available for you. And then if you want to explore, and I'm not sure which generator it is, we just discussed safer pain points. So I'd like to move to a couple of ways that our clients are using Impact Mapper right now to give you all some flavor of the flexibility in the tool. So if you are a donor and you want to use Impact Mapper, there are a number of ways to use it. Right now, most of the donors are using the tool as a way to monitor grantee progress in different portfolios. Of course, you can also do evaluations and engage in any evaluation analysis. If you have any sort of reports or publications related to context or trends in different situations, you can analyze those as well. And really, any interview text that you have, you might want to do some lessons learned or synthesis of data that you're collecting, let's say at the end of grantee reports, really stemming around particular issues that you care about. But to give you a concrete example, we've been working with Oak Foundation who has been one of the primary seed donors of Impact Mapper and has been a wonderful partner. Right now, the Issues Affecting Women's Program has basically coded all of their past grant progress reports and final reports from 2008 until currently. They went through a process of designing a new theory of change with us, which they're now using, and we've tagged all of these word reports that they have and they're able to see according to their new outcomes and strategies what have the changes been since the inception of this program, which has been very useful. Now one of the very cool things, and so that was really using the tagging feature that I showed you a few slides earlier. Now they're moving in the future to collecting reports through our survey platform. So they're now piloting the collection of both progress and final reports through our survey platform, and we'll be rolling that out this year. So that's been super exciting. We've also worked with them over the last year in some of their intermediary organizations around the world in Sarajevo and in Mexico City doing participatory storytelling and data collection outcome workshops which has been really useful. So thinking through WIST foundations and on-profit organizations, how can we actually collect outcomes in a richer way? One of the problems we see in this sector, there's amazing work being done, but when it comes to writing a report and talking about your outcomes, there's a bit of a barrier and a gap, and we get these really boring reports being written that really don't talk to and speak to the complexity of the work we're doing and the reality and the huge and powerful changes that we're making. So how do we transform that? We do some of that with both donors and our profit organizations through these storytelling workshops, and then that data feeds into our system and then they can have access to it over time. You can tag it with our tagging software. You can turn that into the quantitative trends, and then you can visualize it. So it's this really nice, complete package from data collection, data analysis, data visualization, to communication. So we also, of course, nonprofit are using the product as well in similar ways and in different ways. So we're working with an organization, a nonprofit organization, Women's Learning Partnership, to do an evaluation right now on some of their work over the past five years, but also we're starting to help them get online and get all their reporting process online for their partner organizations. So they work in a network across the Muslim-majority world as well as other regions, and they really want to get a sense from their partners, what are their contributions to change, and how does that connect then with the higher international network gains as well. So they're now using a variety of different tools in our software to do that visualization, both surveys, as well as a platform at the basic level, importing past data in a CSV format and in Word reports format, and engaging in some of the charting tools. Other nonprofits have done kind of strategic time analysis, so taking many different evaluations that have been done in a past like say five year period, and doing a coding of those outcomes and seeing to what extent are they contributing towards the strategic plan objectives that they have midway through a strategic planning process, and then using that information as learning mechanisms to improve their work. Other aims could be any research task that an organization has. It could be interview, publication analysis, et cetera. As I just mentioned, there's a lot of need in our sector to really have a nice tool that easily combines qualitative and quantitative data analysis that's easy to use for individuals and organizations, and that produces really compelling and beautiful visualizations to be able to speak to the issues that they care about. And so we have a lot of different evaluators and researchers using our tools for those purposes. We are just finishing up a process working with the Independent Evaluation Office of UNDP. We did this really big analysis of around 120 annual development reports. These reports are produced on an annual basis per country. There's many different countries' strategic planning cycles, and they wanted to get a sense of what were some of those key outcomes and the effectiveness and sustainability of those outcomes towards those strategic plan goals. So that has been very useful. We also have engaged with groups doing synthesis of data, so lots of kind of learning reviews, synthesis of information, and really any analytic niche you have, if you have interviews laying around you want to get more out of, if you have focus group data, if you're collecting most significant change data, you can be using our products or even like outcome harvesting. You could use survey tools to collect data related to outcome harvesting and validate it as well. Again, our surveys are being used by different actors in different ways. I shared with you how donors are using it as a grantee reporting and monitoring tool. Non-profit organizations, if you're engaging in evaluations, you can send these to your partners or your participants in a program and get instant feedback. We're working with a donor network. We're working with a philanthropy advancing women's human rights and they sent out a grantee perception survey a few months ago to set up their grantees so that they could have a closer feedback loop and understand what they needed as a sector. We're also building feedback that will really take donors for the entire process in our system. So they can start sending out an anonymous link for grantee applications and follow the process through progress reporting and then final end of grant reporting. We're super excited about that. So lots of cool ways you can engage with our surveys. Say you have a conference and you need to get some insights and you don't want to lose that data over time. You want to have access to it. You can use the product for that purpose. The other focus we have in our tool is really around storytelling and communications. Organizations have and sit on these rich treasure troves of stories of impacts that are incredibly meaningful to telling that bigger picture of change and why you're important in this space and how you're uniquely contributing. The problem is too often that knowledge might sit with one member in a team, often it's in their minds or it could be in their inboxes and it's not shared across the organization. One of the things we tell every user to do when they come on board with us in Impact Nopper is create a story, a project just filled with awesome stories and quotes that tell their story of impact. And you can tag it in different ways so that different people in the organization can come and have access to that information. So if the executive director needs to go and do a public speech on a particular topic, they can come to this repository and pull out a story very quickly, see what's relevant to her situation and then end up in the speech. If a communications person needs to write a press release and needs a story again, they can come here and get something meaningful or someone's doing fundraising and needs that information and that can be used. So really trying to help provide a knowledge management function for organizations as well that helps them to better communicate and decrease the siloization of information within an institution. And then of course, if organizations are in networks, like I mentioned earlier with the Power Network, there's a lot of really cool and unique things you can do with data sharing through our tool, all being in the same project. You can be tracking collective branch making together. We're working on that project with Power. You can track collective indicators and impact if a network and affinity network has moved towards that step of creating and combining everyone's knowledge together and making a decision on how you want to collectively track change so that you can really speak to broader impact in a particular space or sphere. So we have some of the biggest brands already using Impact Mapper today and we have a really wonderful team that is helping us to get there. A great development team. We have five developers based in Poland and in Portugal. We have a wonderful client support team of four different members all around the world from Mexico, Guatemala, to U.S. and of course other support staff that's helping us with finances and really happy to be here with you all today. The questions you have and I really hope to be working with you all soon and helping you to transform measurement in your own organizations and better track social change and use all this amazing data that I'm sure you have. Awesome. Thank you so much, Alex. We definitely have a lot of questions that are coming in so I'm going to go ahead and start from the top. Again, if you guys have questions for Alex use the Q&A chat box to the left-hand side of your screen and I can ask them to her during this time that we have for the Q&A. Okay, so the first question that I have is what if the data is located in different databases or from different sources? Yeah, so a lot of times that is the case and there's a lot of different strategies for getting data into our system. It depends on what you're using. I'm not sure if you are a donor or a nonprofit organization so maybe I'll just talk about both and we see where the conversation goes from there and feel free to write extra questions so my question blocks are clarifications as I'm talking. But for donors, one of the primary questions they have is, hey, we're using something like Salesforce or like a grants management system and we have the grants that we've made already tracked somewhere else. The answer for that is that usually these software products have stock CSV download option which is essentially an Excel, a special format of Excel document that allows for easy data sharing between systems. So you can download your grant data out of that, send it to CSV, and then it can be uploaded into ImpactMap where all the grants will automatically be there. And then, of course, you have all of the word reports that you probably have or PDF reports with them and you can start uploading those into the system from there. So that's kind of that pathway. You're a donor and you have that sort of a situation with your data. If you are, you know, a nonprofit organization you may be collected, survey data, through family key interviews and words and Excel files and so on. Then we can chat with you at the beginning of the process about what you would like to do with that data and then we can set up a system and get it on to our products, right? And then we can talk to you, upload or stop. Surveys, really, again, it's going to be CSV. So anything in the next Excel format will trans, you know, just saved as CSV. So it's the most efficient way. Okay. All right. So with regards to changing data privacy and protection regulations being adopted and enforced by countries, is it safe for one to assume that compliance of such is maintained? Yes. It is. I mean, that's something the new regulations are very much on our agenda and we're in the process of complying with all of them. So that's not an issue for us in terms of privacy. We are using, you know, the top security measures that, you know, out, or exist. We will be getting a security audit later this year. So this is something, you know, security, privacy, number one on our agendas, and we're making sure we're aligned with all the needed best practices. Great. Okay. So I think there's been a couple questions about Impact Mapper, and if it's free, or if it costs money, so if you want to maybe cover that. Yeah. It's an annual licensee. It starts out for nonprofit for 24 hours a year, so 200 a month. And for foundations, it's 4800 a year, 400 a month, and for each additional user, it's more. And so when you're looking at this as like a knowledge management and really, I mean, learning and fundraising tool, that's, you know, it's really efficient in terms of resources and helps you to be able to do more with what you already have. But we're happy to send this information if organizations are interested in more about pricing or talking about it. Please do get in touch. We can send you the full pricing sheets and open pager and set up a call to talk more. If you're, you know, a really small organization and have a limited budget, we do have options for sliding scale under certain exceptions, so that's something we can also talk about. Okay. Great. So somebody was asking in terms of the math, how detailed and granular can they be? They're saying they might need, they would need the information by neighborhood and spaces, so could you maybe talk a little bit about that? Yeah, it really is how you provide the data to the web. For sure, we can get down to the web level, but you provide the data for us with the appropriate city and region codes. With the neighborhood level, that's something that we would talk about and see if that is possible. I think it would be as long as you have the geocode, right? So what we do is we just have to, for our system data to be able to read that information, we need to have the data prepared in a certain way. Probably if you have those geocoded vacations, then that would be a possibility, but it's all in how the data is prepared, right? And the big hurdle, so if you already have it prepared in that way, then I'm sure there's a technological solution for it. Great, okay. So there was another question in terms of verification. So the question was, is there some type of verification from where data, it says where data was recommended, I think, and model used for analysis? Does that make sense? Yeah, it's a little unclear. I don't know if there's anything in terms of like data verification. I don't know if there's anything like verification. I mean, with surveys, everything is linked to, if you're a donor, everything is linked to the grant, the grantee or the grant and the grant. So when you're sending them, you get the responses back, it's linked to that. Or if you're a profit, you will enter in the participant names and then data is linked to that. So you have that data think-over time, and you can do that longitude and all that analysis, you know, as you need to. I'm not sure if that is answering the question, but for sure we do that. Okay, got it. And then in terms of like integrations and compatibility, somebody was asking, you know, is it compatible with programs such as Microsoft 365? So do you want to maybe talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, I think the next phase for us this year is to develop auto sync with some of the big integrations, and I think Microsoft 365 is one of them. I'm assuming you're talking about SharePoint. Is that what you are referring to when you say that, or is it just Word? If it's Word, then yes. Yeah, the question had MS 365, so I'm not sure. So the Word document, yeah, if it's Word documents, yes, you upload documents into this through Word Format, and we'll be adding PDF upload very soon, and the next month that's covered. In terms of integration with SharePoint, or products like that, or like a Dropbox, or things of that nature, that's something that we have on our pipeline here this year. Got it. Okay, so there's some questions about your current clients. Do you want to maybe talk a little bit about kind of the work they're doing, and how many clients Impact Mapper has, and how they're able to use the tool? Yeah, so we've put a range of questions right now. We're bringing about 45 more on in the next few months. So we're on a period of pretty rapid growth. The new version of the software was launched last summer, and so we're now really rolling out and selling to the community after testing. So yeah, so we have a range of different clients. We have evaluators in this space that we've been working with, different foundations, and some nonprofit organizations and networks. The nonprofit version of the software will be released here in the next few months. So right now that's undergoing beta testing, and it will be launched here soon. Got it. Okay, so the next question is, will the service be available for benefit corporations and or green companies? Yeah, this is really a super flexible tool for any organization that has these data analysis needs. They use the tool. So if you're doing social impact work and you're a social impact company, this is totally something that you could use to track social impact in both the quantitative format and the quality of the format. Excellent, okay. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Oh, now as I was going to say, it's really sector agnostic. And as you see from the tools, we've really built this to be flexible so that you can use it for a variety of different purposes depending on your needs. And you're like a level of expertise as a researcher or evaluator. So there's really quick and easy ways to use the tool. If you're not that familiar with the space and you're just getting started or you want to get more out of the data that you already have and have a theory of change or some priority outcomes in place. And then there's really in-depth ways to use the tool if you are an evaluator or a researcher with a decade of experience. So we are really working to create something that works for a lot of different organizations and their needs. Excellent, okay. All right, I think that is about all the questions that we have. I think we can move into the... Do you want to add anything else or do you feel like you've covered everything? Oh, I mean... I hope to hear from some of you. Please keep following us. Okay, great. Okay, so just a few things before we... Thank you again, Alex, for the presentation. Sorry to those who had some audio troubles, but we will be recording this and it will be available on the website, so we can hopefully clean up some of the audio issues and have it for you guys to listen to again. So if you don't mind just chatting one thing that you guys learned in today's webinar in the chat box, that's really helpful for us to know. You'll get a post-event survey once the webinar is over, so any feedback that you guys have for us is always very helpful. If you guys are on social media, we would love some social media love, so we're on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We also have a blog where we post about two to three times per week with tips and tricks and how-to's and that sort of thing, so feel free to follow our blog as well. And just so you guys know, we have several webinars coming up in March, so QuickBooks. We have three of them on March 6th, 8th, and 15th. Also, we are doing a webinar with Okta on 3.20, and then they're going to be showcasing how they use Okta with City Year, and then we have a digital fundraising tools and trends 2018 webinar happening on 3.27. And just again, one last thank you to Alex. Thank you so much for presenting, and I want to thank our webinar sponsors, ReadyTalk, and yeah, look forward to an email after the webinar today with all the necessary links.