Funding Birmingham: What does the Data tell us?
The data workshop on the 1st May 2024 supported by Birmingham City Observatory and Digital NNS was an opportunity to bring together WM Funders members, several strategic policy VCSE agencies and local authority officers, with data analysts to explore in more depth and become more familiar with existing public data sets, service data sets and funding data that can help improve understanding and the value of data in informing thinking on funding programmes and service priorities. The small group discussions focused on participants identifying a shared question that could be explored by understanding the purpose of wanting the data insight, who would be the users of the data insight and the existing and potential data sources, data protection/ethical issues and the required functionality of the data insight. The key question posed per table:
· Mapping small/micro community groups – where they operate and need against IMD.
· Mapping the socio-economic profile of women in East Birmingham and their social mobility
· How to get the data out there?
· What data is needed to identify ‘cold spots’ in funding and service provision in Birmingham?
During the session, it was evident that there are a lot of open source data that can accessed from different institutional platforms to inform thinking on funding and service priorities. Some participants mentioned further ones that could be used with the existing Birmingham City Observatory data sets e.g UK Household Longitudinal Survey (Understanding Society) and Family Household Survey (DWP), Arts Council (Funding data), DCMS Taking Part Survey,. However, not all of these provide granular details at ward levels or based on all equality characteristics. In addition, both large and small funders also hold data on organisations that receive grants that can add to the overall picture of the VCSE sector that is provided by the sector as well, at national and local authority levels.
Some overlapping themes from the small table exploration of data sets were raised based on the question they were trying to answer:
· There is data that is being collected by different organisations but whether the data can be ‘given up’ due to data protection or ethical issues to provide data insights on key policy challenges.
· Getting standardised data across funders and VCSE
· The cost of providing regular data against the value it adds to policy insights.
· National or regional data sets that are not sufficiently granular to provide data insights.
· Lack of basic VCSE sector data at a granular level
Points were raised in the table discussions on some of the challenges: the lack of capacity to regularly ‘give up’ data collected by organisations; data that is collected not being in a readily useable form; the lack of analytical and interpreting skills within both small or large organisations to use and learn from the data collected; knowing what data sets and where to find them that can be used with other known data sets to support tackling policy challenges.
A Data source list is available here.
WMFN plans to follow up the workshop and Birmingham City Observatory will be summarising some ideas on how some of the challenges discussed could be further answered with other data sets available. These will be posted shortly.
NOTE:
The Birmingham City Observatory leads on the Birmingham Data Charter, an initiative which aims to stimulate and support collaboration which generates value for our citizens and build trust amongst partners who want to share data, value and insight to help solve key policy challenges.
Digital NNS helps Birmingham’s 10 Neighbourhood Network schemes, community groups, connected communities, social prescribers and social workers to build their digital and data skills and capacity so they feel confident about providing the right digital support to their citizens and communities to maximise digital inclusion.