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Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) organisations work with diverse communities across the UK, gathering invaluable insights that reflect complex social realities. By delivering essential services and building trusted relationships, you collect information that highlights the needs and experiences of the people you serve.
Much of this information, however, remains stuck, used primarily for reporting to funders, demonstrating impact, operational planning, and strategic development. Once its immediate purpose is fulfilled, this valuable insights often remains dormant on individual servers, limiting its potential to inform broader efforts and benefit others working toward shared goals. The VCSE sector consists of:
"There is a growing expectation that the sector gets better at collecting the data. This isn't about overarching data on the sector, but this is about the sector themselves using data and collating data, getting better at showing their impact"
- VCSE, LeaderSupported by the Economic and Social Science Research Council, our project seeks to address this challenge by creating tools and frameworks that enable VCSE organizations to better use and share the information they collect. By enhancing data practices across the sector, we aim to build a robust, sustainable infrastructure that amplifies the voice of the VCSE sector in social science research and beyond.
As a VCSE organisation you already know the challenges of communicating and engaging with stakeholders, collecting evidence of your impact, and building networks and relationships with other sectors to maximise the potential of your work.
"We're one jigsaw piece in a really quite complex picture made up of many other pieces. And if we are not linked into and working closely with and aware of and having intelligence about our local sector, our regional sector and the national sector, then how can we develop those local partnerships to be effective?"
— CEO, Local VCSE OrganisationMore specifically, it can be difficult to build balanced and reciprocal relationships with the academic and research sector – it is a common complaint that academic studies are extractive and do not give back to the communities they study. This project aims to shift that balance, working with organisations like yours to make the data collection process more reciprocal and non-extractive.
By helping VCSEs share insights on their own terms, we are creating a space where your information drives social research that's relevant, impactful, and community-centred.
Through this project we will explore how the data you routinely collect could be used to paint a fuller picture of the issues that matter to your organisation. We are working with partners like the British Red Cross, DataKindUK, and the University of Strathclyde to test new techniques and methods that could transform the information collected by VCSEs into structured data that could inform and guide social science.
We're testing how evaluation reports could be run through AI tools to automatically pull key themes and trends, saving time and helping you identify important insights without time-consuming manual analysis.
If you're already using a volunteer management system, we can apply tools that will enable you to look at trends in volunteering and better understand motivations, retention, and community needs.
Many VCSEs collect wellbeing information from staff and beneficiaries. We are exploring ways to standardise this data to create a unified picture that supports local and national advocacy efforts.
We know that data ownership, data sharing and data security are top priorities, especially where sensitive community data is concerned. We are designing this infrastructure with these issues in mind, ensuring that your data remains secure and only accessible to those who need it.
Additionally, we want to minimise the work involved in standardising data collection, making the infrastructure a tool to help, not hinder, your day-to-day operations.
Your data remains secure with controlled access protocols
Organisations retain full ownership of their data
Designed to help, not hinder daily operations
Built in partnership with sector organisations
Your organisation's work is perhaps already helping to shape policy conversations, drive funding decisions, or create a better understanding of your local area and the issues that matter in today's society.
However, we believe that the voices of those you serve, and the value of your work could be strengthened and amplified by the proposed new data infrastructure: by joining together your insights with those of others, we can produce rich collective datasets that have the potential to answer a range of societal and research questions in a powerful way.
We are building a sustainable data infrastructure that enables VCSE organisations to share their insights in a way that's respectful, reciprocal, and impactful. We hope you will join us on this journey to turn community insights into lasting social impact.