Newsletter | July 2025

Cultivating Collaborative Systems with the Connecticut Bar Foundation

CTData's Data Strategic Planning initiative recognizes that nonprofits rarely work alone and are often connected to other organizations working on similar issues or providing similar services. CTData's work with the Connecticut Bar Foundation and the state's legal service providers demonstrates this systems approach in action, where each organization received data literacy training while identifying shared goals for improving access to justice statewide. 

When systems align their goals, establish mechanisms for proving their achievement, and support data sharing, all organizations can more effectively identify service gaps and prove successful interventions. Read the full blog post on our website to learn more about this collaboration.

CTData’s Strategic Planning Service Brings Nonprofits Together

After two years of working with Connecticut organizations to strengthen their data practices, we hosted a gathering of Data Strategic Planning alumni organizations. Representatives from participating organizations came together to share how their Data Strategic Planning work has become far more than simple collection. Participants shared that Data Strategic Planning work improved management, increased DEI work, supported more collaboration, and strengthened meeting engagement. 

The Data Strategic Planning event at Mercy by the Sea featured previous

Data Strategic Planning participant organizations like Hockanum Valley Community Council, who shared how much they learned through the revision of a client feedback tool. The data stories from participants were clear. When organizations engage in data work an organization's potential increases across every domain. Read about our two-year anniversary celebration and the powerful transformations it showcased.

Lessons from Data Strategic Planning

While dashboards promise to transform organizational decision-making through clean, visual displays of key information, they often fall short of expectations without proper groundwork. These tools assume a level of data literacy that may not exist within teams and can introduce bias when metrics lack sufficient context. Successful dashboards require regular maintenance, clear purpose, and organizational capacity to support their use. 

Our experience with nearly 80 Connecticut organizations reveals that the most valuable dashboards are driven by mission-aligned questions that guide leaders toward data-informed action. Read our detailed analysis of why most dashboards fail and how to build ones that actually guide decision-making.

Supporting Connecticut's Affordable Housing System

CTData's affordable housing cohort demonstrated how shared work can transform informal networks into intentional systems. Through facilitated workshops, participants identified shared and supporting activities, discovered gaps in collective efforts, and began outlining shared goals. Together, they mapped their diverse functions and explored how individual efforts contribute to system-wide objectives, surfacing solution-oriented collaboration opportunities. 

This kind of shared dialogue creates the connective tissue needed to transform informal collaborations into a more durable, coordinated system. Learn more about our approach to formalizing informal networks in our blog post.

Hartford Promise: Building a Stronger Data Culture

Hartford Promise's partnership with CTData demonstrates how organizations can overcome data challenges and build a stronger "data culture" across their entire team. Over the course of 18 months of data literacy workshops and coaching, Hartford Promise learned to synthesize their information effectively, transitioning from collecting lots of data to actually using it to answer questions about program effectiveness. The result: they can now show that 76 percent of their scholars graduate from college! Visit our website to read the complete story of this transformation.

Discovery Science Center's Journey from Overload to Impact

The Discovery Science Center's rapid growth from 6 to 25 staff members created communication and data management challenges that DSP coaching helped them systematically address. Working together over two years, they strengthened their organizational data culture by improving shared information systems, streamlining reservation processes, and developing compelling data visualizations for stakeholders. The partnership helped them focus on three key steps: identifying their big questions, recognizing stumbling blocks to answering those questions, and building processes that actually deliver the answers they need. Find the detailed case study on our website.

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