Good work deserves data that can carry the weight

Doing the right work is not always enough. At some point, the numbers have to survive the meeting too: the board meeting, the funder review, the management team that signed off on a strategy and wants to know whether it is actually moving.

That is the painful gap a lot of organisations sit in. The work is honestly good, and the intent is real, and then the question comes in that the data was supposed to answer, and the answer turns into a spreadsheet attached to an email.

It happens everywhere

From what I have seen in the field, and that field by now includes a fair number of BI environments, this is not a budget problem. I have seen it in organisations with full BI budgets, dedicated data teams and real tool investments: data products that fail to carry the weight when the question that matters most arrives.

The tool is rarely the culprit. Whether it is Fabric, Power BI, Tableau or Qlik, the platform decision usually was not wrong. What was missing happened upstream, in the part of the work nobody is paid to do explicitly: the definition of the metric, the ownership of the source, the decision about who gets to settle a disagreement when two teams use the same word and mean two different numbers. The tool was ready, the organisation was not.

If it is that hard for a well-resourced team, it is harder still for organisations whose whole mission is doing good. The ones that depend on gifts and funding to keep going, sitting on valuable data that could prove impact or open the next conversation with a funder, but with no real means to turn it into something usable.

And the gap is getting wider, not narrower

The sector signals back this up. The 2026 CCS Philanthropy Pulse report shows that 36% of non-profit organisations reported difficulty using data for decision-making in 2025, up from 14% the year before. That is a 2.5x jump in a single year. Over the same period the technology has grown faster, with 70% of those organisations now running five or more core applications. More tools layered over a foundation that has not caught up, and the trust gap widens with every new platform.

That direction of travel is not an accident. When data foundations are deferred for years because the mission in front of you is more urgent, every new tool added on top raises the stakes on whether the data underneath is telling the truth. The moment a funder asks for a number you cannot fully stand behind, that gap is suddenly visible to the people whose support you need most.

Why “doing good, with data”

This is where DoGoDa comes in.

It started from a strong belief, humble opinion firmly held, that everyone should chip in to do good. My passion happens to be data, so the question became obvious: why not do good with data? Not as a tagline, not as a brand name to put on a slide, but as a purpose, an objective to do good with data for the people and organisations doing good in the world.

That means two things at once. Good in the technical sense: honest, accountable, ownable, sound enough that a board, a funder, a manager or a frontline team can actually trust the number. And good in the wider sense: with and for organisations whose work matters beyond the next quarterly report.

What DoGoDa is, in practice

It takes a few different shapes, depending on where the organisation is.

It can be the advisory conversation that happens before any tooling is chosen, the one where we work out what you actually need to prove, to whom, and what part of the foundation has to be sound for that proof to hold. It can be a fresh look at a data challenge that has been stuck for too long: the dashboard nobody trusts, the metric definition that two departments will not stop arguing about, the AI pilot quietly sitting on ungoverned data. Or it can be hands-on delivery of data products that work for the people who actually use them, the report that earns its place because the team it serves stops opening the spreadsheet next to it.

What DoGoDa is not: a services brochure. It is not a “we do everything” pitch, not a promise to replace your team or your tooling. It is one honest conversation, followed by the work that conversation makes obvious.

Happy to think this through with you

If you have a data challenge or an idea you cannot quite shape yet, the kind of thing where you know the work is right but the proof is not landing, that is exactly the kind of conversation DoGoDa is built for.

Happy to think this through with you.