Ted Kriwiel
Co-Founder
Ted helps nonprofits build better technology systems. He writes about software strategy and the tools that power mission-driven organizations.
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Miro Ted Kriwiel
Build a Data Model
| 16 minutes
Ted Kriwiel Nonprofits need a data model to make sense of their organization and know whether they're making progress. Using charity: water as an example, Ted walks through how to define the concepts and attributes that drive your mission — from projects and partners to sponsors and donations.
Chapters
Introduction
- 0:00 — Why nonprofits need a data model
From Dashboard Mock-Up to Data
- 1:00 — After mocking up your dashboard: how do you actually get the data?
- 1:40 — Nonprofit data: feelings, vibes, and the things we need to count
charity: water — A Gold Standard
- 2:00 — The impact map as a model for demonstrating mission
- 2:30 — 21 million people served — how do they know?
- 3:00 — Defining “water project”: start, end, cost, location
- 3:40 — Normalizing country data so it shows up on the map
Anatomy of a Project Record
- 4:00 — Project ID, longitude/latitude, and people served
- 5:00 — Multiple sponsors per project
- 5:45 — Nine different intervention types (it’s not just digging wells)
- 6:00 — Local partners and the partner network
- 7:00 — Photos, water point IDs, community names
The Data Model
- 8:00 — How all nine interventions roll up into one elegant dashboard
- 9:00 — Naming concepts and defining attributes
- 10:00 — Project attributes: ID, dates, people served, location, type, budget
- 11:00 — Partner concept: ID, name, category, geography
- 12:00 — Sponsor concept: ID, name, funder type, relationship to project
- 13:00 — Donation concept: one-to-many sponsor relationships
The Software Reality
- 14:00 — Country normalization across tools
- 15:00 — Four tools, four formats: Asana, Airtable, HubSpot, Stripe
- 16:00 — PSA: define your data model before picking software
