Data Toolkit

INTRODUCTION

Data and information about your clients is crucial in securing funding, discovering emerging trends, identifying gaps as well as improving service provision. The data tools are a set of documents which have been designed to help support services in collecting and analysing client data. The documents have been developed based on the information collected during the first year of Homeless Link’s Critical Mass project. Senior staff members from partner agencies and data collectors from other sectors were consulted about current challenges around client data collection and use, as well as what they would find useful in a data analysis.

The toolkit includes a Data Collection Good Practice Guide, a Data Analysis Template, and a template for Analysing Your Data: A Guide to Pivot Tables. They can be used as templates or adapted to meet your organisation’s needs.

The aims of the Data Tools are to:

• offer ideas of how the data collection process can be improved within organisations.
• provide a data collection template which can be customised for smaller services or projects with no formal data collection system.
• demonstrate a simple set-up for collecting and analysing data in Excel.
• provide a guide on how to summarise data quickly in Excel by using a pivot table.
• enable services to compare their clients base with the general population.

Data Collection Good Practice Guide

This document has been designed for use by organisations or projects who would like to improve their data collection practices. It is a good practice guide that contains some practical ideas and suggestions about what can be done to develop and implement client data collection good practice on different levels of an organisation, and can be used with or without the data analysis toolkit.

Download the Data Collection Good Practice Guide.

Data Analysis Template

The Data Analysis Template is an Excel template that can be used to assist in collecting and analysing client data. It consists of several different worksheets in an Excel document, the main one being the data collection template. It has been pre-populated with some fictional data in order to demonstrate the automated analysis feature of the template. However, it can easily be adapted to suit your organisation’s needs. This template has been designed especially for projects with no formal method of data collection.

Download the Data Analysis Excel Template.

ANALYSING YOUR DATA: a Guide to Pivot Tables FOR EXCEL

This document is a supplement to the data analysis template. Its main purpose is to assist in analysing the data you have collected using the pivot tables function in Excel 2010.  It has been designed for individuals who have little to no knowledge of how to use the pivot tables by providing a step-by-step guide, with examples based on the Data Analysis template.

Download the Guide to Pivot Tables for Excel.

more information

If you have any questions or would like to request more information, please contact us.