Guest post: Nominet Trust offer free help from a data expert

As NCVO’s own David Kane has pointed out on numerous occasions, there is now a growing wealth of information, freely available to the public, which could make a big difference to your organisation.  Local Authorities and Central Government are releasing huge amounts of data about public service delivery, measures of social deprivation, population figures, local economic growth and much more besides.  If you were able to combine this data with the information your organisation holds, you could be surprised by what you could learn. 

As described on another NCVO guest post earlier this year, Barnsley Hospice combined Local Authority information about areas of deprivation with their patient lists and discovered that they were not serving some of the most deprived parts of Barnsley as well as they would have liked.  This discovery prompted them to focus their efforts on addressing this issue, to get closer to achieving their charitable goals of serving the whole of their community equally.

Nominet Trust are looking for up to 10 charities who would like to have a free day with a data expert, to take them through what they could be doing with all the open data that is available, and the data which the Charity holds itself.  It would also be an opportunity to think about what kinds of information you could be collecting: to improve your services, attract more funding or campaign for issues which are important to your community.

If you are interested, please send an email to ed.anderton@nominettrust.org.uk. If you think this might be useful but you’ve got lots of questions, I would be pleased to give you a call and talk through how you could make best use of a ‘data day’.

For a bit more detail, have a look at this discussion paper I’ve been putting together: and watch out for Nominet Trust’s new website, launching on 1st December.

Ed Anderton,
Nominet Trust