Down and Dirty with Data in Asia - Part 1

So I've been in China for three weeks now and am finally beginning to settle in. I moved in to my flat last night in Shanghai and I no longer have to sleep on an air mattress in my friend's living room...meaning I can finally go to sleep when I want!

My summer internship is with a small charity called Concordia Welfare and Education Foundation (CWEF). They work in areas throughout China (Shanghai, Guangdong, and Yunnan provinces), Hong Kong, and Cambodia to help alleviate poverty through improved education, health, and service. In Shanghai they provide scholarships to the children of migrant workers so that they can attend middle or elementary school, and also to girls in Guangdong province for high school and university. In Yunnan they have a lot of health projects such as building latrines and wells, as well as training small children on how to wash their hands and brush their teeth. One of the largest projects in Cambodia is providing animals such as goats and pigs to widows so that they can begin to make a wage for their family. I've volunteered with CWEF in the past hosting large fundraising events in Shanghai, so I'm very, very happy to work with them again and use the skills I've learned at the School of Information to help them again.

My internship is to train all the staff in all the various offices on how to use their new online database, CiviCRM on the Wordpress platform. CiviCRM is an open source Constituency Relationship Management system designed specifically with non-profits in mind. With so many different projects in so many different areas, it's been hard for head office in Hong Kong to keep up-to-date on what's happening, and a lot of the regional offices feel like they don't have much connection with the work in other places. By implementing this system to easily share information, the organization can become more efficient and communicate their impact more readily. In addition, by collecting data on their projects on a regular basis, CWEF can analyze and visualize their impact in more interesting ways. In terms of consulting, I will be looking into their workflow and communication flows to determine areas of improvement, and will develop a how-to guide for hosting a fundraising event. I'll also be looking into how they can use their civiCRM to connect to their donors in more meaningful ways.

Students collaborate on a creative project during a CLA training

My second week I had the chance to sit in on one of CWEF's programs, the Concordia Leadership Academy (CLA). This CLA training took place at Jinshan No. 3 Middle School, about an hour south of Shanghai, a city many migrant workers move to. The children of these migrant workers will most likely not continue on to high school, and so CLA is there to teach them some soft skills like teamwork, leadership, and communication, that will help them once they enter the workforce in a few years. From an American perspective, courses like this aren't that exciting, but this is actually quite unique in the context of the Chinese education system which focuses on memorization and passing exams. The teachers were all quite excited to be a part of it, and one told us that she noticed one student in particular made drastic improvements in expressing herself and sharing her ideas with the class after taking part in CLA.

Last week I went down to the CWEF headquarters in Hong Kong to meet with the director. It was great to have my hostel in the same building as the office, but that also meant that I was stuck in the center of Tsim Sha Tsui – one of the busiest and most crowded parts of the city state. I got to have lunch with an old friend, though, and got some great photos of the Hong Kong skyline during the daily light show.

Hong Kong island seen from Kowloon - Batman jumped off that tall building in the Dark Knight!

After my initial meeting with the director, I now have a plan now for developing strong lesson plans for training the staff on their CiviCRM. What's struck me so far as being the biggest challenge in training the staff has been determining protocols and procedures for the use of the CiviCRM. The director of service learning had a lot of questions for me about how they are supposed to use the database, and I realized that this is something I will have to work on very hard in concert with the director of CWEF.

I spent this last weekend in Shenzhen, which is only an hour away from Hong Kong in southern China. I stayed with my brother who is an English teacher there, and we had a couple interesting nights killing some of the largest cockroaches I've ever seen...that's a U.S. quarter next to that thing. These guys are crazy fast, and they fly. Eeeeek!

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If you'd like to know more about how non-profits can use data, check out DataKind, or the events page of the first annual A2 DataDive from this February.