Giving Compass' Take:

 • Eric Dayton, manager of a digital infrastructure for the education nonprofit buildOn, discusses how utilizing data and limiting silos can help drive progress in social change. 

• How can nonprofits avoid silos entirely to help advance social change? Where can donors encourage data-driven methods?

• Read more on how to utilize a data-driven approach to social change.

In 2012, Eric Dayton was a recent college graduate who faced a tech problem that would shape the course of his career. Experience Matters, a nonprofit based in Phoenix, Arizona, wanted him to integrate two isolated spreadsheets. One sheet had information about local volunteers, while the other had data on local community organizations that needed volunteers.

One challenge was that Dayton had studied international relations, not computer science. He didn’t code—his university in Botswana barely had the internet. Experience Matters also lacked a data team to help him. And he knew nothing about Salesforce, the software that the nonprofit wanted him to use to eliminate the tedious process of an employee scanning two disconnected spreadsheets in order to sync volunteers' skill sets with locals’ needs.

Like many people in their first job, Dayton learned as he went. He figured out a system to connect the groups of data. The pace of connections started to pick up: Not long after the new system went live, a former Intel engineer used it to connect to underserved kids at a local music school and he built them a sound studio. Other successful projects soon followed.

The experience showed Dayton the power of easy-to-use, scalable software to turn raw information into something that could make a difference in the real world. It also launched his career as a data manager and gave him insights into the haphazard approach to technology that many nonprofits employed and still use today.

Dayton’s own organization, the education nonprofit buildOn, is one exception. As the organization’s manager of digital infrastructure, he oversees a suite of data tools that is essential to running complex, collaborative, and geographically distributed tasks to construct schools in poverty-stricken countries around the world and run education and community service programs in the United States.

Read the full article about how data can drive social change by Adrienne Day at Stanford Social Innovation Review.