From client tracking, volunteer management, program evaluation, research, marketing, donor support, activism, and collaboration, the ever increasing amount of information recorded means agencies must shift from collecting to analyzing. We help agencies integrate fragmented databases and strengthen their capacity to collect, organize, and use reliable data, thereby reducing administrative burden.

We can provide support with simple analyses of data that helps describe, highlight, or summarize data in a meaningful way such that, for example, patterns might emerge from the data. We can also assist with more complex data analyses, that may help agencies confirm anecdotal evidence, evaluate program performance, or support business planning and decision-making.

Important stories live in our data and data visualization is a powerful means to discover and understand these stories, and then to present them to others. We help agencies to convey their tabular information in a human-friendly and visual way. Because of the way the human brain processes information, it is faster for people to grasp the meaning of many data points when they are displayed in charts, graphs, and maps, rather than poring over piles of spreadsheets or reading text heavy reports.

We provide skills to examine the locations, characteristics, and relationships within databases through overlay and other analytical techniques in order to address a question, gain useful knowledge, predict outcomes, or create new information. This is spatial analysis. The data used may be derived from field-collected GPS information (rough sleepers), an existing database (211 services such as food banks, medical clinics, employment centres), a list of objects with a known location such as an address (emergency shelters), or published GIS data layers (census tracts, neighbourhoods, landuse).