Intended audience: DataKind Volunteers
The Project Champion is the point-person at the partner organization who coordinates activities within the organization and partners with the DataKind team throughout the project’s lifecycle. They are often an end user and/or the data specialist, and someone with deep knowledge and expertise on the problem and/or available data.
As a DataKind volunteer, always treat partners with the same professionalism as you would in a consulting engagement. Here are a few tips for how to maintain a positive relationship with the Project Champion:
Provide clear and consistent communication.
Try to strike the right balance between knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and friendly. Be clear about expectations for each interaction, including the target outcome of each call. Understand the technical level of all the people involved at the partner organization, and don’t overload your communication with technical details or jargon - you may know a lot about APIs and SDGs, but don’t assume other people understand the alphabet soup; explain everything! Ask lots of questions - but after you’ve read the documentation, done your research, and ensured the answers aren’t already out there. Link the work you are doing to the outcomes that they care about - draw a dotted line to their key metrics.
Provide timely responses
Respond to messages from the Project Champion in a timely manner - even if the response is “I’m very busy at work this week and won’t have time to look at this until this weekend, but I just wanted to let you know that I received this and look forward to reviewing it and responding by then!” Recognize that each organization and individual has their own communication preferences (e.g. email vs. Slack), so make sure you ask about these preferences before the start of the project. Even if a task is supposed to take a couple weeks, check-in with them, let them know you exist and are still working on it. This maintains a cadence to keep the project going strong.
Treat them as a true partner; not just a passive “recipient” or “beneficiary” of the project.
While DataKind volunteers may have data science skills, the Project Champion comes with an indispensable mix of domain expertise and institutional knowledge. Make sure the Project Champion knows that we genuinely appreciate their input and guidance. Start your initial meetings with introductions to get to know each other and take the time to learn about their organization structure if needed. Keep track of milestones and where you are on the roadmap with the partner organization, so they know that progress is being made.
Set Expectations early
Potential Project Champions come in with a range of expectations, depending on (a) their prior experience with data science, and (b) their prior experience with volunteers. If their expectations are unmet, they’re unlikely to have a good experience. At the beginning of your project, make sure that the Project Champion is on the same page about at least the following items:
- Data science is not magic. Things may or may not work out, but we won’t know until we try.
- In order to steer the project in the right direction, there will need to be frequent and regular communication between the partner organization and the DataKind team. We’ll need the Project Champion’s help to facilitate these communications.
- Since this is a volunteer-driven project, we’ll need to be reasonably flexible about project timelines.
- If necessary, identify additional team members who need to be included in conversations with the Project Champion. For example, an individual working in IT/technology may be the best to address questions regarding data sources.
- Respect their work/life balance boundaries - volunteers consulting with professionals is a difficult balance. It’s likely that you might work on the project at a time when the Project Champion is already off for the day. Be patient and prepare for the project to take a little longer than in a normal consulting engagement because of these constraints.
Create a regular cadence of meetings.
Most people find bi-weekly meetings at the same day and time to be most useful, but make sure the next meeting time is agreed upon at the end of every meeting (you can also use a tool like crab.fit for easy meeting scheduling). You can always cancel meetings that are not needed, it’s much harder to get meetings on the calendar than it is to take them off. These meetings can be useful for checking in on success metrics and progress together. At the end of each meeting, make sure to have a clear list of next steps.
In an early meeting, ask the Project Champion what would be a fair amount of time in which to expect responses and set deadlines on responses to emails accordingly. Different types of organizations will have different response cadences. Reinforce the decision on response time during the email follow-up. This gives you a clear time to check back in if the response does not come by then.
Adopt their language.
The language that an organization uses to describe its day-to-day work is a reflection of its mission and culture. By adopting the words or phrases used within the partner organization, you show the Project Champion that you respect their vision and values. Here are some real project examples from DataKind San Francisco of what that looks like:
- Suppose that a homelessness nonprofit refers to people whom they serve as “guests”. Calling recipients of the nonprofit’s services “guests” rather than “homeless people” demonstrates that you share the partner organization’s commitment to individual human dignity.
- Suppose that a nonprofit frames their mission in the context of “citizen science”. Linking project workstreams and outcomes back to “citizen science” demonstrates that you support public participation in scientific discovery.
Contributer(s): Rachel Wells
Contact us
If you would like to learn more about us, partner with us, or get in touch, email us at community@datakind.org
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