City Bridge Foundation - charting a course to data maturity

City Bridge Foundation’s origins lie around 900 years ago, as the organisation responsible for the maintenance of London Bridge. Over the years, this role expanded to include the management and maintenance of five bridges – Tower, London, Southwark, Millennium and Blackfriars. As well as this, since 1995, an arm of the organisation has used surplus funds to award grants to charitable organisations across Greater London. 

In September 2023, the funding arm and bridge maintenance arm merged to form one team of around 200 – now known as City Bridge Foundation.

A City Bridge Foundation envisioning event at London’s Barbican Centre in March 2024

Data challenges

For an organisation with such a wide-ranging remit, data is a challenge. The grant-making activities alone place City Bridge Foundation as London’s biggest independent charity funder. Over the past 10 years, the organisation has awarded at least £25 million a year in grants for the benefit of Londoners. 

One crucial step the organisation took to improve their use of data was creating a dedicated data analyst role. Emma Horrigan joined the impact and learning team in April 2020, with a particular focus on understanding the impact of the grants the organisation awards. Emma says:

“Our key challenges are not really specific to us as an organisation. Understanding impact is a classic challenge for a reason – it’s a hard nut to crack. Another is the speed it can take to see the result of changes. Even as you make inroads into cleansing, organising and collecting the right data, it’s at least a few years before you can confirm those changes are enabling the organisation to make good decisions. Data improvement’s a bit like trying to turn around a big cruise ship in that way.”

Particular hurdles Emma began tackling immediately included enabling the longitudinal analysis of data and the ability to quickly identify impact on key groups.

“We had lots of rich data that came from funding applications, detailing who and what grants would support. But there wasn’t an easy way of quickly identifying – for instance – all the grants over time that had supported migrant groups. A key early job for me was establishing a set of tags that speak to the impact of a grant – all the funding managers now use these to tag their current portfolios and historic grants were back-coded in our database, so we can interrogate our data more easily.”

Gaining a snapshot

Another early task for Emma was to come up with a plan for data improvement. But Emma knew that, to chart a course forward, she needed a clear picture of where the organisation was. Within her first six months in post she found the Data Orchard Data Maturity Assessment and used it to take a snapshot of where the organisation was with data.

The report showed a respectable score of three out of five overall, with strengths in skills, leadership and culture, and weaker scores in uses, analysis, data and tools. Armed with this framework, Emma formulated the first three-year data plan for the organisation.

“Our first plan focused on questions like ‘are we asking the right questions?’, ‘how do we know we've got accurate information?’, ‘are we reporting correctly?’, ‘how do we keep learning, and ‘how can we share what we're learning?’ So, it was really aimed at getting the basics in place – in particular making sure the data itself is correct, accurate and being shared in the right way.”

Rising tides

As well as focusing on the fundamental need to have the right data, Emma is something of a force of nature when it comes to sharing knowledge and enthusiasm about data. She set about her data evangelism with a clear goal to demystify data for all staff.

“Often people see data as a monolith – a scary thing ‘over there’ that they don’t want to go near. But I feel strongly that the more data literate everyone is, the more productive we can all be. A rising tide lifts all ships. It's all well and good to have me as a data analyst, and it’s fab that everyone knows they can come to me. But it's even better if people can self service.”

Exposing others to data has sometimes left Emma facing her own fears. For instance, Emma was surprised herself, when she invited staff members to join a live webinar to watch her analyse some unfamiliar data… And dozens of colleagues took up the offer.

“I was pretty terrified beforehand, and there was a moment midway where I totally lost the thread of where the analysis was going. But I just took a deep breath, talked through what I was thinking and did what I would normally do. And it went amazingly well. The response was exactly as I hoped – people saw that it’s not magic, even data analysts get stuck with data, but it’s just a case of trying again. Data is messy and difficult sometimes, but getting stuck in and having a go is the best way.”

When Emma also had a big turnout for a followup workshop – a live quality assurance of a spreadsheet of someone else's data analysis – she knew she was onto a good thing.

Measuring progress

But how well did all this work to improve data and how it’s used pay off? In 2023, Emma revisited the Data Maturity Assessment, this time inviting other team members to take it too.

Overall, the assessment showed an improvement in City Bridge Foundation’s data maturity. From a score of 3 in 2020 (right on the cusp between ‘Learning’ and ‘Developing’ in our data maturity framework), to 3.4 in 2023 (firmly in the ‘Developing’ stage).

Interestingly – given all that work to get the data house in order and encourage people to get stuck into using and analysing data – the themes ‘data’, ‘uses’ and ‘analysis’ show the most significant improvements.

‘Skills’ is the only area in the latest assessment that showed a decline, though this is quite common for organisations repeating a data maturity assessment. The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know.

The basis of Emma’s next data plan is to share these results and look at each of the seven themes to identify key actions to take in each area. Internal communications around leadership’s use of data is one area to address. Emma highlights that an emerging issue is that staff aren’t fully aware of the extent to which the leadership team uses data for decision making.

“In our case, it’s not that the leadership team aren’t making data-informed decisions, but we do need to better communicate how our data is being used at a leadership level.”

Targeted action 

While further details of the organisation’s next data plan are under wraps for now, Emma is clear that the future will be guided by regular progress checks with the data maturity assessment.

“The data maturity assessments have been the cornerstone of everything we’ve done so far. It’s been so useful to have a benchmark and a framework for what we could reasonably tackle next. I’m passionate about helping people with data but you can’t tackle everything at once. You need a structure and the framework has become my framework, as well as helping spark lots of my ideas.” 

Emma’s realistic that future gains may feel slower and harder to come by. The shift from having no data specialist, to having a dedicated data analyst will have informed some of the improvement seen between the first and second data maturity assessment. But, the organisation now seems to have gained some momentum in its data improvement journey that will stand it in good stead when it comes to tackling tricky issues like data culture. And Emma is determined to remove any lingering fear factor about data: 

“For us, part of making the cultural shift is simply in people not being afraid to ask questions about data. We’ve already seen that shift towards people asking more questions, but also asking better questions. That’s one of the biggest indicators, for me, that we’re on an improvement journey where staff are becoming more engaged with data. Data has to have a point, and when you start to see people engaging with why it's important, and what we need to learn from it, it’s really encouraging.”