The NTEN Communities of Impact participants are conducting a survey about how nonprofits use data. Learn more here, or if you can spare a few minutes, go straight to bit.ly/COIsurvey. Thank you!

As part of the Communities of Impact pilot program, participants are tackling topics like measuring and managing data, and making data-informed decisions. We're looking into these topics ourselves and would love your examples and ideas.

With support from Microsoft, we recently launched a pilot program that brings together 19 thought leaders who will work together to create solutions around nonprofit data measurement, reporting, and transparency to benefit their organizations and the sector at large.

[Editor's note: The following is from the December 2012 issue of NTEN:Change, NTEN's quarterly journal for nonprofit leaders. Read the complete issue on "Collaboration" when you subscribe to the journal for free!]

By Rachel Weidinger, Upwell

Developing a High Touch, Human Platform for Collaboration

At Upwell, we’re inventing a new way to work together. We’re a nonprofit, data-driven social media PR agency with one client, the ocean, and one goal: more people talking about the ocean. It’s our mission to make the ocean more famous online. Competition is real in the marine conservation space. “Blue” orgs get a small fraction of environment funding. With just a year and about $1 million to prove our model, this pilot project (incubated by Ocean Conservancy) had no choice but to invent a new way to collaborate. Taking on this project felt like jumping off a cliff.

We started the year by asking the NTEN community about the technology resolutions and goals for 2013. Today, we are sharing some of those topics and suggestions for getting started today - from social media to the cloud.

Over the last few years, NTEN has been working with nonprofits to understand how to better wrangle all the data they’re creating and what’s available to them into improved results: more mission impact.

But what about the steps an organization has to take before collecting or analyzing the data? How do we determine which data matters in the first place, and how that data will impact the direction of our work?

We are very excited to release a free resource to help nonprofits get started with this important strategic steps:

> Getting Started With Data-Driven Decision Making: A Workbook

With this workbook, we hope to provide nonprofit leaders with a set of worksheets that will help guide thinking and planning around more effective data strategies.

Download the workbook for free.

In April 2012 NTEN worked with Idealware to conduct a survey of nonprofits about their relationships with data, and what we found was a large dichotomy—either they were doing a lot with their metrics or not much at all.

In addition, we learned that internal factors--such as staff capacity, expertise, and budget--as well as external demands and stakeholders—including funders; local, state and federal governments; donors; clients; and community groups—also hinder an organization’s ability to make strategic use of data they have collected.

Download the complete report, "The State of the Nonprofit Data."

The 2013 Community of Impact cohorts will focus on two real problems, opportunities, or business solutions. And we want your help in identifying the most valuable focus areas for this work.