When Public Data Disappears: How Organizations Can Adapt with Data Strategy
How do we measure the impact of our work when public data vanishes? In the United States, as the current administration continues to take down and defund many sources of publicly available data, worries over how such cuts may impede the tracking of program outcomes remain large. However, amid the chaos, there is one direction non-profits and other organizations can turn to for clarity: Data Strategy.
The Current State of Public Data
As of January 31, 2025, thousands of web pages across US governmental websites have been taken down, including critical data on public health and education, including vaccines, chronic diseases, climate change, and hate crimes. Federal grants related to vital data collection in education have also seen drastic action, such as the termination of 169 contracts within the Institute of Education Sciences, including the National Center for Education Statistics’ collection and reporting of education statistics. These rapid changes have created confusion and concern, as many organizations rely on this data to understand the unique needs of the communities they serve.
Initial reactions to these changes have been mixed, with many organizations scrambling to compensate: grabbing still available data by downloading frequently used sources, collecting new data as quickly and expansively as possible, or feeling lost as to where to even begin. While these reactions are understandable, the key to navigating this uncertainty is to develop a clear data strategy.
What is Data Strategy? And Why Does it Matter?
Simply put, a Data Strategy refers to a plan for how an organization collects, stores, and uses data to understand and improve its impact. A well-planned Data Strategy provides a roadmap for organizations to understand how strategic goals relate to trackable outcomes and clarify the quantity and types of data needed.
For many non-profits and small organizations, data can be scary —where to start, what to collect, and how often to collect it—let alone using it to understand outcomes or make improvements. Such work may seem especially treacherous when navigating a changing data landscape, where long-relied-on, publicly available data sources are no longer an option.
However, even in the current unpredictable data environment, a well-defined data strategy can be key to navigating these challenges.
Benefits of Data Strategy
Even in optimal data environments, where publicly available data is easily accessible, a strong Data Strategy provides many benefits, especially for organizations with limited data resources. Because data strategy aligns data collection and usage with an organization’s mission, strategies, and goals, this allows you to:
-
- Use Resources Efficiently to Only Collect Data that Matters: Narrow down when existing data sources and new data collection efforts are truly necessary to understand your impact, preventing data panic and allowing your organization to work smarter, not harder.
- Make Evidence-Based Decisions for Greater Stakeholder Impact: Having a Data Strategy shifts the focus of data from solely reporting outputs and outcomes to using data for continuous learning to drive informed decision-making related to program implementation and improvement. Such insights help your organization to use time and resources more effectively, honing in on what efforts have a greater impact within your communities served and what may need to be tweaked in the future.
- Clearly Convey Your Impact to Donors, Funders, & Communities Served: A clear one-to-one between goals and data can make reporting easier, allowing you to support statements about progress and impact with data insights. Such streamlining helps to better convey your organization’s goals, progress, and impact to funders, ultimately building trust and transparency.
- Strengthen Your Team’s Data Skills & Knowledge: Data strategy can also highlight strengths and weak points in your team’s data understanding. It clarifies data roles and responsibilities, better preparing your team to think about where additional data training and support may be required.
Actionable Next Steps
If your organization is navigating the loss of previously available public data, now is the time to act:
- Revisit Your Strategic Plan: A strategic plan outlines an organization’s values, mission, activities, and goals—providing overall direction for its work and data collection efforts. For example, if a strategic plan includes the goal of “increasing diverse educators in the community,” it signals the need to track the number of diverse educators (and potentially more nuanced identity data). However, with the removal of certain federal education data sets, this data may no longer be publicly available. In this case, an organization may need to develop their own data collection methods, creating appropriate data collection tools to gather and track relevant data over time. Additionally, identifying data needs early on allows an organization to collaborate with local partners for collective data efforts. This makes the strategic plan essential for understanding what data needs to be collected, how, and when to collect it.
- Assess Your Current Data Situation: What data do you have? What data do you need? States maintain varying levels of data archiving. For example, Illinois hosts publicly available data across many of its Departments and Board websites, including its Board of Education, Department of Human Services, and Department of Public Health. Other external tools that compile data also exist, such as the Illinois Early Childhood Asset Map, which hosts a database of early childhood data spanning back to 2005. If you are located outside of Illinois, many similar resources may exist within your locale. You can also see if the data your organization uses is available on the Data Rescue Project site. The Data Rescue Project is a cross-organizational effort to create a clearinghouse for data rescue efforts and access points for at-risk public US governmental data.
- Develop a Data Strategy: There are a number of ways to develop a data strategy. At EduDream, our five-step approach is both comprehensive and individualized to your organization’s needs:
To learn more about what a Data Strategy journey looks like and to further understand its benefits, register for EduDream’s first Data Strategy Webinar on April 30 from 1- 2 PM CST.
