Data Inquiry

Background

Active provides facility management tools for YMCAs and cities’ Parks & Recreation departments. Recently, both of these groups have become interested in building more sophisticated data infrastructures, and they want to use their data to improve their outreach and impacts on local communities. Active provides multiple tools that track the registration history of users and facility management and assists with simple data visualizations. For this project, I was tasked with learning more about how our products were used by our customers and identify enhancements and new features to better meet their needs and help them measure and assess their community impacts.

For this project I spoke with 10 high-value customer organizations. Due to a larger than expected list volunteers, my supervisor also interviewed some of the customers. The purpose of our interviews was to understand how our clients defined success towards community impact, and how their current data ecosystems enable or hinder them from being more effective in leveraging data.

Problem

My task for this project was to identify how customers used data to impact their communities, and to understand how their current data ecosystems may constrain how their organization considers alternative solutions.

Many city departments and YMCA branches need to modernize their IT environments but have significant budget constraints. Most of their funding comes from city budgets, member/user fees or charitable giving. Active has a number of products that tracks this information. City departments and YMCAs have recently focused on community demographics to help them identify segments of the community that have been historically ignored. Unfortunately, our programs often create a lot of tedious manual efforts for our customers by not working well together, most of whom have small data teams. This project sought to understand how these data teams spend their time and help us improve our software to eliminate repetitious tasks, allowing these groups to focus more on engaging with their communities.

Recommendations

Our customers want to track long term impacts in their communities, including: when people joined, events they participate in, when, and how often, they use available facilities. Our customers want this data to be detailed and robust enough to tell a story of children who started participating in athletic camps and later volunteered to lead those camps as teenagers.

Both YMCAs and parks departments want Active to establish a more singular source of knowledge. They want it to be easier to understand how data is collected, shared, and analyzed. Parks departments spend a lot of time providing reports to potential donors, and this would greatly reduce the amount of time they spend in data gathering and reporting for internal and external stakeholders.