Analysis Group partners with the Shannon Trust
By Chris Morgan, Director of Business Support at the Shannon Trust
Measuring our learners’ progression with help from Analysis Group
Shannon Trust transforms lives by supporting people in the criminal justice system to learn to read and improve other basic skills, so they can pursue wider opportunities and thrive in the community. More than 50% of people in prison either can’t read at all, or struggle to, and so we train and inspire people in prison who can read (mentors) to teach those that cannot (learners).
Every month, we collect data on our reading programme from approximately 100 prisons across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This data, which gives us valuable insight into learner numbers, their demographics, and their progress through our programme, is submitted on ‘Activity Register’ spreadsheets. These are then uploaded into our secure CRM system, allowing us to report on our impact to stakeholders, as well as understand what’s working well, and what’s not.
The challenge
Our learner numbers are growing fast as we put more resources into prisons, and as we leave the disruption caused by the Covid lockdowns behind us. That means the volume of data we collect is increasing month by month. Because this data is collected and submitted to us by hard-pressed prison staff, we regularly come across problems such as duplicate or inconsistent data, as well as data formatting issues which prevent us uploading the data into our CRM system. We were facing a major challenge every month in reviewing, cleaning and collating this learner data. As a charity with limited administrative resources, this was detracting from our core activity of teaching people to read.
The solution
The pro bono team at Analysis Group worked with us to understand our needs and the issues we faced. Using R-studio, an integrated development environment for R (a programming language for statistical computing) they built a tool which will:
- Check every Activity Register for errors, automatically correcting obvious errors (such as incorrectly formatted dates) and produce an error report for those errors requiring manual intervention. This will save us hours of effort every month in manually reviewing thousands of data items for errors.
- Automatically collate all Activity Register data onto one single spreadsheet ready for upload into our CRM system, removing the need to do this manually, and reducing the potential for human error.
We’ve grown fast in the last year, enrolling more than 2,000 new learners onto our reading programme in 2022 – 50% more than in 2021. Finding quicker and easier ways to do things is key to enabling us to grow even quicker in 2023, whilst making sure our limited resources are focussed on our learners.
So thank you to Analysis Group for working with us to develop this solution, and also to The Lightbulb Trust for introducing us to them.
Analysis Group partners with the Shannon Trust
By Chris Morgan, Director of Business Support at the Shannon Trust
Measuring our learners’ progression with help from Analysis Group
Shannon Trust transforms lives by supporting people in the criminal justice system to learn to read and improve other basic skills, so they can pursue wider opportunities and thrive in the community. More than 50% of people in prison either can’t read at all, or struggle to, and so we train and inspire people in prison who can read (mentors) to teach those that cannot (learners).
Every month, we collect data on our reading programme from approximately 100 prisons across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This data, which gives us valuable insight into learner numbers, their demographics, and their progress through our programme, is submitted on ‘Activity Register’ spreadsheets. These are then uploaded into our secure CRM system, allowing us to report on our impact to stakeholders, as well as understand what’s working well, and what’s not.
The challenge
Our learner numbers are growing fast as we put more resources into prisons, and as we leave the disruption caused by the Covid lockdowns behind us. That means the volume of data we collect is increasing month by month. Because this data is collected and submitted to us by hard-pressed prison staff, we regularly come across problems such as duplicate or inconsistent data, as well as data formatting issues which prevent us uploading the data into our CRM system. We were facing a major challenge every month in reviewing, cleaning and collating this learner data. As a charity with limited administrative resources, this was detracting from our core activity of teaching people to read.
The solution
The pro bono team at Analysis Group worked with us to understand our needs and the issues we faced. Using R-studio, an integrated development environment for R (a programming language for statistical computing) they built a tool which will:
- Check every Activity Register for errors, automatically correcting obvious errors (such as incorrectly formatted dates) and produce an error report for those errors requiring manual intervention. This will save us hours of effort every month in manually reviewing thousands of data items for errors.
- Automatically collate all Activity Register data onto one single spreadsheet ready for upload into our CRM system, removing the need to do this manually, and reducing the potential for human error.
We’ve grown fast in the last year, enrolling more than 2,000 new learners onto our reading programme in 2022 – 50% more than in 2021. Finding quicker and easier ways to do things is key to enabling us to grow even quicker in 2023, whilst making sure our limited resources are focussed on our learners.
So thank you to Analysis Group for working with us to develop this solution, and also to The Lightbulb Trust for introducing us to them.
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