Heart, Soul & Data

On today's podcast, we're trying something new for the first time - a live coaching session. Listen as I talk to Dr. Haywan Chiu about what he should measure in his business to help determine its impact. Dr. Chiu had a unique idea during the pandemic to record his and his partner's surgeries and add voice overs and descriptions for specific parts of the surgeries. In doing so, he has assembled a comprehensive video library where they give insight into each procedural step they do. These in-depth videos have turned into a subscription business that has grown since its inception. However, he's wondering what he needs to be monitoring to know if what he's doing is effective. What is the impact of these videos? Where should he be spending his time/resources moving forward with his business to have the maximum impact? 

Listen in as I spend this episode talking through his goals and discussing different ways to measure his impact. We discuss a couple different methods of measuring his impact such as an equivalency study, using a proxy variable and conducting surveys, and the pros and cons of each.  

Dr. Haywan Chiu, DPM FACFAS is a board-certified podiatric specialist for foot surgery and reconstructive rearfoot/ankle surgery at Albuquerque Associated Podiatrists in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He specializes in diabetic limb salvage.

Dr. Chiu's medical education has taken him from coast to coast in the United States. He completed his Bachelor of Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2007, before moving east for medical school, graduating from the Temple University School of Podiatric Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 2013. His residency took him back to the west coast and the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) Palo Alto Podiatry Residency Program and Stanford University. 

Before joining private practice, Dr. Chiu was an assistant clinical professor at the University of New Mexico in the Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation department. It was during his early years of practice that he found his specialty area: diabetic limb salvage.

Dr. Chiu works with countless patients with diabetes who come to him with severe infections in their legs. The conventional approach is to amputate the leg to get rid of the disease, but Dr. Chiu has found that many patients are willing to try alternative approaches to save their foot.

Great, so you have data! Now how do you make it useful? There is a difference between looking at data and using data. The successful use of data is when an organization is using data to take strategic action related to its goals/direction. Come listen along as Data Bloom co-founders David Mackay and Tim NeCamp discuss their method for making data useful. The four stages they outline are Planning, Collection, Analysis and Reporting and in today's episode they give lots of helpful information on ways to execute each of these stages and common mistakes they see when going through each one. 

David is passionate about working with mission-driven organizations to achieve impact. He has 14 years of professional experience in design, operations, and project management. As a project manager, David guides organizations, teams, and individuals towards a shared goal. He will ensure our work aligns directly with your mission and theory of change. His design experience allows him to think creatively to solve problems with data. This design-thinking has informed David’s belief that everything must be done with purpose. His operations background has shown him how to use data and technology to improve efficiency and implement successful initiatives throughout an organization. David has seen the value of data to inform decision-making throughout his career and is excited that Data Bloom allows him to partner with those making the most impact in the world.

David has a B.S. in Graphic Design from the College of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning at the University of Cincinnati.

Tim has spent his adult life seeking out ways to combine his interests in mathematics with his desire to make the world a better place. Tim first fell in love with community development and working with vulnerable populations to create meaningful change through Teach For America as a middle school mathematics teacher in a high-needs school district. While in graduate school, Tim used his statistical knowledge to impact his community by volunteering for Statistics in the Community (STATCOM), an organization that provides free statistical and data consulting for local nonprofits. As a member, project leader, and eventually the president of STATCOM, Tim saw how data thinking and data usage could help community organizations achieve their goals. Tim is excited that Data Bloom allows him to dedicate his time, energy, and resources to continue this work.

Tim has a B.S. in Mathematics from The Ohio State University, a M. Ed. from University of Nevada Las Vegas, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Michigan.

Imagine your organization is a house. The tech stack is the pipes in the house, and the data is the water that flows through the house. When building a house, there are lots of things to take into account to build a successful plumbing system. The same goes for data - your tech stack needs to be correctly accepting the data from the business process that feeds it, you need to size the pipes adequately to allow the data to flow from point A to point B, and you need to have the right tools on the backend to get the water out of the pipes and make the water usable and palatable. 

Come listen in as Liz Crowe talks through her insightful analogy between data flow in an organization and plumbing in a house, and what she's doing to revamp the city's data analytics. She talks through barriers, lessons learned and the goals she hopes to achieve. 

Liz Crowe joined in the City in August 2022 as the Director, Urban Analytics & Innovation (Urban AI). She is responsible for championing the use of data and modern data analysis, visualizations, and storytelling to provide a much more engaged approach to performance improvement and change management. Liz is an economist and researcher, who is passionate about civic tech, data and the possibilities they hold for Cleveland. An experienced data manager, she has years of experience in economic development, nonprofit management, venture capital, and the private equity industry.

Most recently, Liz served as Principal of Data Governance & Analytics at JumpStart, Inc. Prior to joining JumpStart, Liz worked as a Research Associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. where she conducted primary research on the role of government programs and private organizations in supporting low-income families in the U.S. Topics included, cash and in-kind assistance programs, the U.S. social safety net, poverty, inequality and social policy. Liz also worked at the Congressional Research Service at the U.S. Library of Congress, where she provided nonpartisan research assistance to members of Congress and their staff.

Liz has a Ph.D. in Public Administration and Policy from the School of Public Affairs at American University, as well as Master of Arts from the Department of Economics at American University.

To celebrate my 50th episode of this podcast, I'm sharing four major mistakes I make in analytics and life. It's part of a resolution I made for 2023, to share one mistake every Monday on LinkedIn for the entire year. I HATE making mistakes, but I am committed to try to learn everything I can from them and hopefully help others learn something too. 

In this episode, I talk about how I'm not the best at slowing down and making sure I did all the little things right, I would rather default to a passive decision than actively make one with incomplete data, I love being the 'data superhero' instead of building consistent data practices and team capacity, and how I'm often a terrible listener. 

I haven't solved these things yet, but I'm getting better. I'd love to hear from you if any of my mistakes and lessons resonate with you, or if you have your own lesson to share! You can contact me or connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you for sharing this journey with me!

You can read the show transcript and find other resources at http://www.heartsouldata.com/ep-50/

Success with data isn't about having all the resources, it's about being resourceful (thank you, Tony Robbins!). We dive into exactly what this can look like with Joshua Burkhow, Chief Evanglist at Alteryx. It's starts with recognizing that data underlie virtually everything we do, professionally and personally. Nearly all our actions generate some kind of data, every choice or change has data attached to it, somewhere. The first step is becoming aware of the true extent and existance of the data around you.

Once you can see it, then the next steps follow more easily. In fact, the biggest barriers you may face are your own limiting assumptions, such as assuming that you can only work with data if you have a large team of experts. Tools like Alteryx are out there to help empower even "teams" of just one person.

Listen in as Joshua shares examples he's seen of small shops driving big impact with data, and how you can too. 

Joshua Burkhow is the Chief Evanglist at Alteryx, a low-code analytics platform that empowers experts and citizen data workers alike. He brings passion, excitement, and raging optimism to Analytics and Data Science with a nice balance of ensuring he's also an expert and practical solutions-oriented user. He lives in stories and use cases that really drive impact to businesses but have a clear focus on the contributions from people. He loves automation and productivity as a solid foundation to doing bigger and better things. At the end of the day, he has learned to lean on his emotional connection to world of Data and Analytics. It's given him an amazing career and he's seen its practitioners change the world for the better.

It's not just a bad idea to try to make decisions from pure logic - it's actually impossible. Join me in today's podcast episode to walk through my framework for understanding why values are a requirement for any sized decision, personal or professional, and how you can combine a clearer understanding of your values with the right data to make more effective choices. 

Values are essential for making decisions because they are what give weight to different outcomes and costs. Consider the last time you used Apple or Google Maps. First, you had to know where you were going. That's not a data question - that's about what you're trying to accomplish at that moment. Then, once you plug in that destination, Apple or Google uses ALL THE DATA to come up with several different routes - one that's the fastest, one that uses the least fuel, maybe even one with the fewer turns. Which one do you pick? All that data was vital to define the cost and benefits of the different routes, but no amount of data can tell you whether it would be more important to you at that moment to get somewhere quickly vs. efficiently. That depends on your values. Without values, your decision-making landscape becomes hopelessly 'flat': there's nothing that distinguishes any one outcome or sacrifice from another.

The thing is, you don't need me to tell you to make decisions this way - you already are, because it's the ONLY way to make decisions. What I offer in this episode is a framework to make all those pieces explicit and transparent so you can facilitate group decisions within your organization and combat the dangers of opaque choices. The framework involves five steps, which I capture in the acronym EMOTE:

E=Eden. This is your destination, the goal you are trying to achieve

M=Morals/Mitigate. These are the values and constraints that must be respected while attempting to get to Eden.

O=Options. Brainstorm options that will (likely) get you to Eden without obviously violating your key morals or constraints.

T=Triangulate. Bring in the necessary data points to weigh your options against the amount of progress they make towards your Eden, how well they support your values, and whether there are any unmitigated limitations.

E=Evaluate. After you've made your choice, review: how effective was your choice? How accurate were any assumptions or guesses you needed to make? How can you adapt or improve?

I share this framework as part of a larger presentation, and you can download the accompanying slides here. If you're out and about while listening to this episode, I recommend coming back again after you've finished it to get the slides and follow along with the framework on a real-life decision you are facing. 

Please leave me a note in the comments or send me a message letting me know what you think of this framework, whether it works for you, and how I can improve it! 

What does it mean to build an effective learning culture? Why is it important to expect that we have a learning culture? Why are your questions are your most valuable assets? Listen to today's podcast with Tait Kellogg to hear about how you can implement a learning culture in your team or organization. She outlines a 4 step process to help create a structure to build an effective learning culture, and discusses common challenges she sees for each step. 

Tait began her work at the intersection of data capacity and college access when she served as Data Analyst for the Woodward Hines Education Foundation over a decade ago. She has spent the rest of her career aiming to help staff like the one she was at that time: staff who see the value of data to inform strategy and communicate across audiences but aren’t sure where to begin. Tait founded The Evaluation Coach as a step-by-step process to help small non-profits and grantee cohorts to understand why data matters, identify their outcomes, and learn to tell the story of their programs. Previously she led a research team as the Director of Research and, before that, served on large, mixed-methods academic research teams through the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University. Tait holds an interdisciplinary doctoral degree in City, Culture and Community with a focus on sociology.

Determinig the right technology for your organization can be challenging. There are many options out there for any one function in an organization. Balancing the inherent capabilities, the amount of customization needed, and the price of the technology is key. Today, Sarah Epting discusses how to find the right technology stack for an organization. She discusses things to consider when making an decision and some pitfalls to avoid. 

Sarah's advice for an initial step if you're considering enacting or switching technology is to first identify the pain points you're dealing with in whatever process you're completing, and understand why they're the pain points. Interview others in your organization to determine if they share these pain points. Then, you can be clear on a good fit for new technology. 

Sarah Epting is the Founder and Director of Technopath. Prior to founding Technopath, Sarah earned her MPA in nonprofit management from Georgia State University and worked in nonprofit management for over 10 years. During that time she found Salesforce and saw the immense potential it had to transform the way nonprofits serve their communities. She wanted to show more nonprofits how they could leverage Salesforce to stretch their often small budgets and support their staff in making a bigger impact. She founded Technopath to address those gaps and further their missions, and has dedicated herself to aiding nonprofits in their growth with the help of technology.

In addition to her nonprofit expertise, Sarah brings 7 years of Salesforce Administration experience and 6 Salesforce certifications. She is an experienced speaker and trainer, having presented at nonprofit conventions, Salesforce events, and her weekly Salesforce Saturday meetings.

Sarah lives in South Florida with her circus-performing/handyman husband and their adorable cat, Scratch.

We use data in our everyday lives - even when we go on vacation. Listen to Luke Komiskey explain how his data analytics knowledge empowered him and his wife to take an extended vacation and travel around the world. Luke discusses how he was able to accomplish his goal of traveling for a full year, and how a simple data collection model made this trip of a lifetime possible

What gets measured, gets managed: Luke's first piece of advice when embarking on a new project (whether it be a long trip or other data-related project) is to be clear about how you define success. Then you can put metrics in place so you know you'll be successful. He explains how he used this advice to accomplish his travel goals. 

Luke Komiskey is the founder and managing director of DataDrive, an analytics-managed service provider for fast-growing organizations looking to grow a data-driven capability without the hassle of hiring a data team and managing infrastructure.  Luke also is a public speaker on analytics topics for conferences, community events, and podcasts!  Reach out to him at [email protected] or find him on LinkedIn (/in/Komiskey)

Any of us can find our way to data. So many of the guests on this show have accidentally fallen into data, and the diversity of backgrounds, academic disciplines and skillsets add strength to the data community. It's truly the difference between the mindset of I can learn anything given time and support vs. I'm not a numbers person.

Ryan Rucker is an example of someone who accidentally found her way into data - and now she's helping bring an extraordinary non-profit forward in how it uses its data to achieve its' mission. Come listen along as she talks about the changes she's making, the challenges she's struggling with, and the innovative solution that she's applying in her organization using "data envoys" to continue data conversations outside her data team and build a bridge. See the article she references that inspired her idea here: Using Data Storytelling to Disrupt White Supremacy Culture | by Lydia Hooper | Nightingale | Medium

Ryan Rucker serves as the Director of Data and Evaluation at The Literacy Lab, an organization that believes that literacy is a human right and that all children deserve to learn how to read. She supports the organization through data analysis, program evaluation, and creating spaces for even the most data-averse individuals to engage with data and collaborate with peers. After over a decade working with different education nonprofits, she has found her passion through increasing and improving opportunities for students, data storytelling with an equitable lens, and elevating the experience of folks, particularly folks of color, who work within the nonprofit sector. She received her undergraduate and Master of Human Relations degrees from the University of Oklahoma and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Education degree in Leadership and Learning in Organizations at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.