Data that Makes Us Smile

Imagine a room full of people. Add catering, add live bands, and add a stand-up show. Now songs and live auctions. Imagine the warmth of the many volunteers who organized this dinner, by their means, and in their own time. Entire families, are dedicated only because of the desire in their hearts to collaborate in every detail. This was SonRisas’annual fundraising dinner.

Now, picture a neighborhood with unpaved streets, where three community centers work tirelessly to support local families. These centers provide workshops, healthcare services, recreational activities, and meals for those who need them most.

But how do these two scenes connect? Are they separate worlds, or could they be part of the same reality?

With effort and dedication, the community members who attend SonRisas (sonrisa means smile in Spanish) centers made possible a night that prooved how, when working together, dreams come true.

The first scene takes place at the annual fundraising dinner for SonRisas, a nonprofit civil association based in Esteban Echeverría, Buenos Aires Province. Their mission is to restore the rights of vulnerable children and adolescents.

The second scene belongs to SonRisas as well. Through hard work and dedication, the very members of the community who attend the organization’s centers made this night possible—a night that proved how collective effort can turn dreams into reality.

How did we get here? What does MUTT have to do with all this? Let’s start from the beginning.

Since we are #DataNerds at heart, it all started with a question: “How could use our #DataNerds Condition” to help people?

That’s how Mutt4Good was born. It’s a division inside Mutt where Mutters learn to be more flexible, adapt to different ways of working, and find people that are also passionate about helping people.

While exploring organizations, Mutt4Good crossed paths with SonRisas. The NGO manages 3 community centers located around Esteban Echeverria.

That’s where the SonRisas team along with the families work together to create sports, recreational and educational workshops. Children in these community centers also have medical assistance available. Everything is funded with donations and a huge team of volunteers many of whom are already part of the SonRisas Community.

Making Data Visible

Our first meeting involved getting to know the SonRisas team and trying to understand “What can we do to help?”. The initial questions aimed to find out if they had any data, what data they had, where it was stored, and how deep a conclusion they wanted to get about their foundation to make better, evidence-based decisions.

During these meetings, a distinct need emerged. They wanted to know the kind and amount of impact the activities in the community centers were having. They wanted to have a comprehensive picture of each community center. How they were doing in terms of attendance, the type of activities available in each, if there were graduates from workshops, how much time kids spent in the community center, and other descriptive analyses.

These were some of the questions we were trying to answer while keeping an eye at the same time on the data availability and our know-how.

SonRisas’ team and ours decided that the best way to evaluate our analysis and give them autonomy to create a report dynamically was developing a tool to build a PDF file. That way they could choose the period to analyze without having to depend on us.

So, we got around to it!

Adapting to a new environment

At Mutt Data, we are used to adapting to new challenges, it’s in our blood. We just grab the available tools, evaluate the situation, and see what we can do to improve it. In this case, the SonRisas team had information stored in SalesForce. That is where they uploaded the data related to each child and their families. Also, they had a registry of the different activities and workshops they worked on. Then we used Google Colab Tools to generate the report we agreed on, so they could download them in PDF.

Stronger Together

The process of getting, and defining teams to work with, researching the way to tackle tasks, and meeting with the SonRisas team while unifying criteria, and deciding on an objective took several months of internal meetings.

All the while, async work went on, and as we went along we tried to consistently show results. The improvements were made possible thanks to the feedback and open communication between both teams. As with many projects, understanding and organizing the data was the first challenge we faced. We tackled it successfully, allowing us to define key impact metrics and gain a clearer understanding of their activities.

As the weeks passed, our relationship grew stronger.

We managed to coordinate an in-person visit to the SonRisas headquarters, where we finally met the people behind the screens and the families who rely on the association’s constant support. We were there, walking through the facilities, witnessing firsthand the incredible effort of the volunteers and the profound impact they have on the families in the neighborhood.

Like in several other projects, understanding the data and being able to organize them was the first challenge that we faced. We were able to solve it and move towards the definition of impact metrics, and a general understanding of their activities. As weeks went by our relationship became closer. We managed to organize ourselves and get together to attend a real-life meeting in SonRisas’ central headquarters and get to know the people who were part of the programs, like the families who help and are being helped.

We saw in first person the effort of the volunteers and the enormous impact they have on the neighborhood families. In the end, we were present at the 20th anniversary of SonRisas, a dinner organized by the families, with live shows, live dancers, and games for the whole family.

Results

Having turned in the deliverable that we agreed on, we could analyze any period from 2023 and onward, for example, amount of workshops, the kind of workshops in development in each location, and finally the number of kids in attendance. Furthermore, we were able to see the dynamic of the participants of each center through the year and the week time spent in each location.

Although the NGO already had Salesforce, they relied entirely on a single volunteer who knew how to use it, generate reports, and share the information with the rest of the leadership team.

Together, we created a way to democratize access to these reports with just a couple of clicks. Now, any director within the NGO can access the data instantly. As SonRisas’ director put it: “Information reached all coordinators quickly and accessibly—like never before.”

SonRisas (Smiles) is a community that attends to 1500 children and teenagers a year and 700 adults, with 80 workshops with different aims (education, sports, professional skills). Plus the health team helped 380 people, and the progress of 960 people where followed along. More than 400 people had breakfast at the centers (or other meals) and the Sonrisas team worked with 240 families during the food insecurity crisis currently going on in Argentina.

Smiles and More Smiles

These projects always turn out to be a win-win. On our side, we got to learn to use new tools, meet new mutters, incentivize team building, be flexible, grow on our willingness to help others, and adapt to new ways of work. We believe these are all factors that directly impact our growth. The SonRisas team constantly expressed their gratitude for the accessible tool we provided—one that empowered them to analyze data and make better decisions.

The director’s words say it all: “Technology came to support a grassroots organization—one that often operates where the State doesn’t reach, but where MUTT DATA did. The best time we ever saw SonRisas’ information was when you presented it to us last year.”

Messages like these fill the heart and leave a smile that lasts.