3 Ways to Embed Data into Your Next Meeting Agenda

Not everyone feels like a data person (yet). Like many teams focused on implementing programs, it might feel like processing data would need to take over your programmatic work in order to be useful. You may want to bring your data out of spreadsheets and into a culture of continuous improvement but feel like your staff are already spread a bit thin. Where would you even start?

Luckily, your next team meeting is the perfect place to embed the practice of using data in ways that are accessible.

Here are three ideas you can add to your next team agenda to build a culture of data in small, manageable steps.

1.        Share a data success story.

Has someone on your team recently made a change based on data in a way that could be replicated by other staff? Look for examples of these small wins around practically using data and lift them up in your next staff meeting.

Quinn recently wrote a report for her non-profit’s board summarizing the outcomes of a financial literacy program she managed upon its five-year grant completion. She sent the report out to others on her team but hadn’t heard any feedback. This was the norm -- staff at her organization are often managing multiple programs and don’t usually take the time to read reports if they don’t directly pertain to their work. To be fair, even if they read it, it might be difficult for them to pick out the most relevant findings without much context.

Quinn’s boss, Catherine, noticed how Quinn had effectively captured data around the program’s student learning outcomes. Her approach helped simplify the core goals and results of the program to the board. Catherine thought they might mix up the weekly staff meeting by lifting this finding up to the rest of the team. At the meeting, Quinn walked the rest of the team through how she went from (a) identifying the program’s outcomes to (b) writing an appropriate survey question to capture student experiences to finally (c) visualizing the simple graph she had created in excel. The rest of the team were given an opportunity to imagine how they might apply these same steps to capture their program outcomes.

2.        Offer a bite-sized learning.

Have you come across an approach to collecting or communicating around data that might be useful for your staff to keep in mind? Block off a ten-minute micro-learning session to keep learning at the center of your time together.

I used to coach staff around data-literacy at a university-based center for community engagement. Since this was a group regularly attending and presenting at conferences, they often offered space for a micro-session about what a staff member was teaching or something relevant they had learned. At one session, a representative from the Institutional Research office came to the meeting to show the team how they could use university-wide data dashboards to incorporate data into grant applications. A great follow-up session would be for a member of the team to demonstrate how they used this data to make a decision, establish a benchmark, or tell the story of one of their programs.

3.        Walk through a data-informed decision-making process.

Have you or someone on your team recently made a decision using data, even a small one, in ways that could be an example for others? Take a few minutes in your next meeting to highlight the value of data-informed decision-making and walk through how you have used this practice with transparency.

Kayla supervises FAFSA completion program at a college access non-profit. By exploring the program’s data, she finds that her team was able to complete more FAFSAs virtually by allowing students to sign up across the state, rather than holding in-person appointments. Although the virtual appointments were initially a response to the pandemic shut-down, she finds that this approach attracted higher numbers of adult students. The leadership team uses this data to make the decision to offer online FAFSA assistance hours on Fridays and market them to adult students across the state.

Rather than making this decision among the leadership and moving on, Kayla uses the next staff meeting to explain how the data led to this decision. Staff leave with a few reflective questions to consider how they might be making decisions around their programs in ways that can be informed by data.

You can cultivate a data-informed culture through small, intentional steps. Try devoting ten minutes at your next staff meeting to learning through data and message me to tell me how it goes.

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And please share this post with someone else who cares about fostering team learning and using data for continuous improvement in accessible ways.

--Tait