Start with a plan, not a project.
Most organizations don’t need a big system. They need to know which problem to solve first. That’s why nearly every engagement with us starts the same way — with a four-week Data Roadmap. From there we scope the build to fit your budget, your tools, and your team.
The Data Roadmap: four weeks to a clear plan.
We map what your data can do for you, what it would take to get there, and in what order. You end up with a written plan that’s clear enough to hand to anyone — to us, to a different vendor, to a new internal hire, or to your board — and they’d know exactly what to do next.
Inventory
We interview four to six people across your organization — leadership, the staff entering the data, whoever builds the reports today — and catalog every system, export, and spreadsheet in play. Including the ones nobody calls a system.
Diagnosis
Where the pipeline breaks, where staff hours disappear into manual assembly, and the gap between what you collect and what your funders and board keep asking for.
Opportunity mapping
Every opportunity we found, sorted into three horizons — quick wins, build-outs, and foundational work — and sized by effort and expected value so you can actually choose between them.
The handoff
A written roadmap plus a live walkthrough with your leadership or board. Not a slide dump — a document that survives the meeting and still makes sense six months later.
- A map of your data systems as they actually work today
- A prioritized list of opportunities, each sized by effort and value
- The written roadmap, with the reasoning behind the sequence
- A walkthrough presentation for leadership or the board
One organization, up to six interviews, up to three source systems examined in depth. Anything larger, we’ll quote separately.
The roadmap is yours either way. If the right next step is something we’re not the best people to build, we’ll tell you that — and the plan still works.
The work we take on next.
These are the engagements a roadmap usually points toward. You can also come to us for any of them directly — the roadmap is the recommended starting point, not a required one.
Dashboard Development
See your program data in real time, in one place — built for your whole team, not just your data person. We design around the tools your staff already know, so the dashboard becomes part of how you work instead of one more thing to learn.
Data Integration & Automation
Connect the siloed systems your team juggles so the same client isn’t tracked in three places — and automate the manual reporting grind so nobody’s copying and pasting every week. The work that used to eat a morning runs on its own.
Data Analysis & Evaluation
Answer the questions your funders, board, and leadership are actually asking — is the program working, and how do we know? We turn your data into findings you can stand behind, in a format people will read and act on rather than file away.
Collective Impact Coordination
Getting many agencies to share one trustworthy picture is as much a coordination challenge as a technical one. We’ve worked inside multi-agency data systems — so we speak both the technical language and the convening language, and we know how to protect the people behind the numbers while still showing collective progress.
Fractional Chief Data Officer
Senior data leadership without a full-time hire. We embed part-time as your organization’s data executive — setting strategy, guiding decisions, and building capacity in your team over time. It’s a rare offering at the nonprofit scale, and often the difference between one-off projects and a real data practice.
Free Data Maturity Review
Not ready to commit to a roadmap? Start here. Our 10-minute assessment tells you where your organization stands today and gives you two or three specific, prioritized recommendations in plain language — no jargon, no generic score, and no pitch required.
Products from our own practice.
Some problems came up often enough that we built the tool once and made it available to everyone. Each one started as client work.
Donor Overlap
Match your volunteer records against your donor records to find the people already doing both — and the ones most likely to. Built for development teams who suspect the overlap is there but can’t prove it from two systems that don’t talk.
donoroverlap.com →Footprint Review
Career and organizational narrative research. We assemble what the public record actually says about a person or an institution into a brief you can use — for a search committee, a board, or your own next move.
Ask about early access →Parcelwise
Parcel-level opportunity scoring for cities and economic development agencies. Every parcel in a jurisdiction, scored transparently against local zoning, land value, and vacancy data — so you can see the whole board instead of the parcels that happen to cross your desk.
Ask about early access →