Data Labs

How does it work?

Charities, funders, social enterprises, public sector interventions all need to understand the impact of their work. Doing so means they can maximise the good they do, and minimise any harm.

But often, they have no way to know the long-term impact they have on people’s lives—whether their work changed the course of a person’s life in the long term.

Our Data Lab project is designed to do just that. By comparing the journeys of their beneficiaries to the journeys of those who are similar to them, a Data Lab can help organisations answer the question: did we make a difference?

NPC is proud to be one of the actors that stimulated the development of Data Labs.

Data labs are innovative because they help charities overcome the following barriers to rigorous evaluation:

• They allow charities access to government data that would otherwise be inaccessible
• They put expert government statisticians to work on charity data
• They use a clever approach called Propensity Score Matching to compare those who benefited from the intervention to those who didn’t

Check out this recent example of an evaluation of an employment programme for young people, produced by DWP.