NPC has worked with many charities and social enterprises over the years to help them work out what data they need to understand and improve their work. It can be a confusing question, and sometimes even the word ‘data’ puts people off. Here our head of impact management James Noble introduces the different kinds of information organisations can collect.

When faced with complex problems, we often end up looking away from the major issue and instead search for smaller things to improve. Dan Corry explains why we should resist this impulse.

15 years doesn’t sound long, but it means we’re older than Twitter, the X factor and the financial crash. So we’ve seen a few things. Here our longest serving member of staff and head of our charities team, Iona Joy, shares her top lessons from a decade and a half of trying to do good better.

An acute public sector worker crisis in our prisons means that some officers are too understaffed to safely unlock prisoners to take part in purposeful activity. For charities working to support prison residents, this is a real problem. Grace Wyld looks at the importance of accessible prisons, and how digital solutions might help.

In spring we wrote a letter, backed by 24 charities, to the Secretary of State Jeremy Hunt, outlining the need for a Health Data Lab. Find out what he thought, and what comes next.