Storytelling with Data: Examining the Use of Data by Non-Profit Organizations

Despite the growing promotion of the "open data" movement, the collection, cleaning, management, interpretation, and dissemination of open data is laborious and cost intensive, particularly for non-profits with limited resources. In this paper, we describe how non-profit organizations (NPOs) use open data, building on prior literature that focuses on understanding challenges that NPOs face. Based on 15 interviews of staff from 10 NPOs, our results suggest that NPOs use data to develop narratives to build a case for support from grantors and other stakeholders. We then present empirical results based on the usage of a data portal we created, which suggests that technologies should be designed to not only make data accessible, but also to facilitate communication and support relationships between expert data analysts and NPOs.