Data Philanthropy

Every year, Sainsbury’s Analytics donates their skills and expertise to help charities gain insights from their data.

We’ve been doing this since 2012, and each year we work with different charities to understand their challenges, what data they have and how we can help them draw insights from it.

This year, we worked with 7 charities, seeing over 100 analysts and charity members get involved. We used data to answer questions like, ‘Which location should we expand to next?’, ‘How effective are our outreach activities?’ and ‘How can we use analytics to speed up our programme acceptance process?’

That’s where we come in. By lending a hand, we help charities:

• Increase their impact
• Make programmes and services more efficient
• Prove impact to gain funding
• Understand and target their donor base
• Attract and retain volunteers

And our analysts get to do some rewarding charity work that expands their skills. Plus, working with analysts from different parts of the business brings our teams closer together.

We also worked with charities that increase social mobility and help people support themselves and their families:

We spoke to charities about their data and discussed how we could help. After completing interviews, we selected charities to work with. Each selected charity was given an ambassador, who acted as a liaison. They worked with their charity representatives to understand its data, plan our approach and clean the data ready for the day.

Getting to lead these mini-charity projects is a unique opportunity for our analytics ambassadors. Many analysts don’t develop these skills until later in their careers.

We created teams of 10 volunteer analysts with varied skill sets that worked on each charity project during a hackathon-style day. Throughout the day, the ambassadors lead their individual teams.

The day after, the charities and wider Analytics and Data teams came together to listen to the ambassadors present their findings. We finished the event with a trip to the pub!

• Software – Tableau, PowerBi, Microstrategy, Excel and spatial analytics software
• Coding languages – SQL, R and Python
• Analytics techniques – Logistic regressions, creating random forest algorithms, factor analysis, correlation analysis, trend analysis, interactive maps and many modelling techniques!

• Building a model that can predict whether an applicant will be eligible for the charity’s programmes. Enabling the charity to focus their time on assessing applicants most likely to benefit from their services.
• Using modelling to suggest the most effective driver routes for volunteers to deliver goods, depending on their home location and the locations of donation pick up and drop off points.
•  Grouping donors based on the amount of money they have given, how frequently they donate and how recently they made their last donation. Enabling the charity to target them with emails personalised to the individual donor type.
• Analysing survey data and volunteer/participant profiles to understand what factors make a successful mentor-mentee relationship. Improving the charity’s matching process and boosting the success of the scheme.

Knowing you’re helping charities to be more efficient, so they can generate more support and keep growing and ultimately help more people is very heart-warming.

It’s also a brilliant opportunity to learn new things and expand data skills. You get to know different teams and all while helping worthwhile causes. It’s collaborative and fun, with an overwhelming sense of achieving a lot together in a day.