Internal Organisational Policies
Internal Practices/Policies and Staff Education • Develop a series of steps to identify needs internally • Develop ways to crowd-source and learn what others are doing • Determine how to integrate real best practices among staff
- Is the question “How to integrate responsible data practices into all staff consciousness?” OR “What are the responsible data practices?” Internal Audit: recognize your needs
• Do you have transparency requirements? (Posting your grants online, reporting to board/governance) • To whom do you answer? (Board, government?) • Do you fundraise or have an endowment? Do you have to use data to raise money? • What is the size of your staff? o Do you have separate teams for program and operations? How connected are they? o Do you have a formal protocol to flag sensitive grantees, or is it just common knowledge among a small team? • Are you growing or in transition? • Do you make grants to individuals or organizations? • How long does it take to make internal changes? • What system do you use to track data? Do you have paper files? • How long have you been around? How many years of files do you have stored?
Your philosophy of responsible data: How to raise consciousness of responsible data among staff? Have a conversation with your full staff about your philosophy: • Of grantmaking: who are we working with? How do we let them lead? How do we protect them/their information? • Of responsible data elements: What, why, and where do we share? What is the life cycle of our data? • Of practices and policies: what are examples of best practices from other organizations? Which apply to us given our needs? What is realistic for us given capacity?
Next step: collect case studies, share, and crowd-source additional ones, perhaps at an IHRFG conference or on a webinar Common themes among groups • Responsible data practices are case-specific for fdns as well as grantees • It must be organization-wide, all staff: o Understanding and consensus on importance o Will and capacity • Understanding among Grantmakers and grantees: what we need, why, where it will go, and ensuring grantee understands importance too
• What are the actual policies that you need?
• The answer is, “It depends."
o NED, for example, has 90 staff in grant making alone.
o They have enormous sets of policies, knowledge management challenges.
• Needs Assessment Questions:
o Do you have transparency requirements?
o What is your governance structure?
o Do you fundraise? Have an endowment or some other source of guaranteed $?
o What is the size of your staff?
o Are you growing or in transition?
o Do you make grants to individuals or organizations?
o How does process change happen in your org?
o What systems do you use to track grantee data?
• What data do we collect?
• How do we collect it?
• How do we use it?
• How do we transmit it?
• How do we store it, and for how long?
• How do we get rid of it?
