An exploration of SAC’s Pioneering Role as a Data-Driven Social Enterprise

In social enterprises, data is greater than numbers on a spreadsheet. Every data point represents a life, a story, or a chance for positive change. Probably the most significant examples of data-driven social enterprises are animal welfare organisations. Each shelter attempts to gather the info of animals, its volunteers and likewise its each day operations.

The existence of inherent data challenges at small-sized, social enterprises makes the prudent use of such data a difficult task for shelters. These challenges include those around data integration, standardisation and democratised consumption. The causes of those challenges are the standard suspects — Lack of dedicated resources to do data and a scarcity of a data-driven culture on the organisation.

Nonetheless, in the sphere of animal welfare there are just a few organisations which are making a conscious try to get the ball rolling. One such organisation that’s redefining how data is managed at animal shelters in the usis Shelter Animals Count (SAC). To those that work in data at smaller-sized organisations, you’d recognise the challenges SAC faces as being silhouettes of your individual challenges. In this text, I provide a high-level deal with how SAC is evangelising the use of information through motion.

Fundamentally, the info team at SAC recognises the importance of getting a streamlined technique of data collection, constructing the technology to make it so simple as possible and automatic for non-technical shelter employees and providing self-service capability of using analytics to democratise an information culture throughout the animal welfare system of the U.S. Unsurprisingly, these are also strategies that work well for other small-sized organisations (for profit or not-for-profit).

This text wouldn’t have been possible without the kindness of the parents at SAC for agreeing to reply my questions, especially Samantha Hill (Director of Data & Technology, SAC). Samantha spearheads SAC’s vision of collecting, standardising and providing shelter data at a national level.