Across the homelessness response sector, there’s a notional understanding that data is critical to guiding decision-making and communicating with our peers and stakeholders. However, there’s often a discouraging amount of daylight between the level of engagement with data we hope to see from our audiences and the engagement the data actually receives. Data practitioners are swimming upstream against long-embedded perceptions around who is or isn’t a “data person”, and that the effort of going through the entire data collection, management, and analytical process only results in incomplete, narrow, or unwieldy snapshots of ground truth.

This session will explore how to proactively deconstruct these misconceptions in your community through easy-to-implement communication tactics. We’ll use interactive role-playing exercises to demonstrate how technology can help facilitate engaging data conversations and provide step-by-step walkthroughs on how to tailor data visualizations to meet the audience’s needs. The session will also demonstrate how moving between aggregate and disaggregated/client-level data humanizes high-level analyses and celebrates the hard work of individuals who collect the data. Attendees will come away from the session with a stronger understanding of the difference between exploratory and explanatory analyses, and when to use each approach.

These learnings are drawn from experiences working with data teams across the Built for Zero networks. Through long-term partnerships with data practitioners working to bring data into race-equity conversations, case conferencing meetings, or public-facing websites, we’re excited to share what they’ve learned about engaging audiences and to continue learning from those who are changing their community’s data culture.