How a nonprofit uses data to tell ‘micro stories’ and combat myths about hunger
Subscribe to the Nonprofit Storytellers Podcast on iTunes, Spotify and Google.
Have you ever needed to combat "myths" about the people you serve?
The creation of a data dashboard — a concept often used in businesses, and created for programming at Des Moines Area Religious Council — has proven priceless in shaping the narrative and providing real-time facts about food insecurity in the area.
DMARC is an interfaith cooperative that works with 200 faith organizations from five world faith traditions. Serving Central Iowa, the nonprofit is best known for their food pantry network that supports many local pantries.
CEO Matt Unger was drawn to their mission because someone not having access to food "is just flat wrong," he told host Mackenzie Walters during their podcast discussion. "There are some fundamental human needs that we all have. The need for shelter, the need for food, the need for safety."
"I just feel a responsibility as a human being to make sure that those basic needs are being met," he said.
On the podcast, we talk about the following. We highlight a few pieces of our conversation — which have been edited — below.
Finding the "unicorn volunteer" that helped DMARC build a data dashboard
How DMARC shares "micro stories" that are eye-opening to faith congregations and other supporters
How the data they collect shapes the narrative in their advocacy work
How they gleaned data to better understand where food insecurity needs are
How real-time data about pantry use helped them share with local news outlets in real-time when a record was broken
More podcasts and articles that might interest you:
How a nonprofit’s storytelling campaign tripled donations after featuring personal stories of their clients and supporters
Donations and support increased after a nonprofit published an annual magazine
A colorful brand strategy that brightens up the DSM airport with a friendly feel
At DMARC, you have a unique ability to see what's going on in real-time across your pantry network — a data dashboard. Tell me about what problem you were trying to solve when that was implemented.
The idea behind how we solve food insecurity is not ultimately going to be by giving people food. What we need to do is understand the circumstances people are facing and change those circumstances so they don't find themselves in a food insecure position to begin with.
The first time someone comes into one of our pantries, we have a questionnaire that they walk through. Some of it is general contact information about where they live, how many folks are in their home. But we try to drill down and find out a little bit about what their income situation is, what their work situation, what kind of education they have. What other assistance programs they use.
We then take that information and put it together in the aggregate, and we build a portrait of what a typical pantry visitor would look like as far as the circumstances they're facing. Then we can use that both to promote the work that we're doing and in an advocacy way — in talking to policymakers to make sure they understand how rules and law changes make an impact.
What did you do to set up the data collection?
It took a lot of training among staff members and volunteers at the 15 pantries across the network, and that's something that is ongoing on a regular basis because volunteers come and go.
The questions are not a tool for who's getting food, but to understand the person who needs food. From there, it was just a matter of — OK, how do we collect this in a digestible way? And that's what the dashboard really did for us, in a way that's visual and not just numbers on a piece of paper.
To be able to look at a map and see where food insecurity is across our community, and be able to look at the numbers between how far they are driving from their home to the pantry to get assistance. We can break it down by school district, senate district, house district, school board.
If we're going to go and speak at a faith community, with that map we can draw a two mile radius around where that place is located and tell them exactly what's happening in your neighborhood or across your community. It's been a really helpful tool, and it's opened people's eyes.
When you present to a community, is there anything that's surprising?
The thing that catches people off guard is how many of those getting assistance are children. When we look at the entire population of folks that are coming through our pantry network, always at least a third of it is children. And especially when we're facing some of these policy arguments — how people just need to get a job — this shows it's not a workforce problem.
The other thing that surprises folks is that food insecurity is a prevalent issue across the entire region. It's not an inner-city issue. It's not just in our lower-income neighborhoods. It's across the suburbs, the wealthier areas that people would think there isn't any food insecurity. There's plenty of it there too. It doesn't take much for someone to find themselves in need.
Let's talk about resources. How did you get this up and running?
The intake system was something that already existed; it's a privately held software that we purchased access to. That's the base of it.
The dashboard piece of it, we got lucky with a "unicorn" volunteer. A former board member had the capacity to build. He built it in a platform called R, which is publicly available and he has stayed with us and helped our data team here do updates and grow it and make improvements to it.
It's something that always is the first question we get asked, well, where do I buy this? How can I get this? It's a little disappointing for folks. You're going to have to find someone that will help you do this. But those people are out there. There are chief technology officers that are retiring from places all the time. And that's kind of how we got lucky with this board member.
You just have to find that right-fit volunteer because it's not impossible to do. It's not easy, I want to be honest about it, but it can be done. It's the old rule: You don't get what you don't ask for. So you go out there and pound the pavement and ask folks if they can help you do something like this.
You mentioned that it's helpful to see what's happening that day in the data. Can you give an example?
Earlier this year in January, we experienced the busiest day we've ever had in a single day in our pantry. And to know midday that that was going to happen and prepare for how we will share this story: Who do we need to talk to about this? To be able to make the news.
So much of the data in this world lags months or years. To be able to see the exact trend that's happening right now, it is incredibly helpful.
———
How does your nonprofit share its story through marketing, fundraising, or outreach? Consider sharing a how-you-do-it story on the nonprofit Storytellers podcast. Submit your nonprofit’s story by filling out this form.