Fast Data Science

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Through its vast network of National Alliances, our nonprofit is activating the global movement for reproductive, maternal and newborn health and rights.

I work as the Senior Communications Officer, working closely on the "What Women Want: Demands for Quality Healthcare from Women & Girls" campaign that heard from more than 1 million women and girls in 114 countries about the one thing they want most for their own reproductive and maternal healthcare through an open-ended survey.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Fast Data Science?

The "What Women Want: Demands for Quality Healthcare from Women & Girls" campaign resulted in the collection of nearly 1.2 million open-ended survey responses from women and girls around the world, in 18 languages.

Fast Data Science helped us analyze the requests to help us create advocacy agendas around those requests; these advocacy agendas are currently being used to elevate the voices and demands of women to create policy change. Fast Data Science used NLP and machine learning to analyze the survey responses, and to create an interactive dashboard for advocates interested in examining the data.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to understand the data we had in our hands, and be able to examine it and use it in a way that would allow our group to elevate the demands of nearly 1.2 million women around the world.

SOLUTION

How did you select Fast Data Science?

Fast Data Science had all the qualities we were looking for in our large data project - in-depth understanding of the technology needed to achieve our goals, as well as excellent staff capable of explaining the complex technical aspects of the work in a way that our entire team could understand. And, as the name implies, Fast Data Science was extremely fast, helping us meet our deadlines.

Describe the project in detail.

After connecting with Fast Data Science, we held an initial kickoff conversation where the complexities of our project were laid out. We then shared all of the data and work that we had done on the project with Fast Data Science to run their analysis and begin the work.

Within one month, which included several conversations and refining of our requests as our side understood the power of the technology available to us, we had an our data not only analyzed but shared back with our team in plain language and in clear infographics.

We then began a new phase of the project where Fast Data Science converted our massive amount of static data into an interactive dashboard using Python and other tools.

What was the team composition?

I worked most closely with the Data Science Team, with others from my organization's side joining in on phone calls and planning sessions.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Fast Data Science helped us analyze nearly 1.2 million open-ended survey responses, allowing us to clearly see what our data was saying, and is now helping us present that information for an external audience with an interactive online dashboard that will allow users to perform their own deep dives into our data.

This dashboard was a dream project that we were not sure was actually possible to create - Fast Data Science helped us realize this dream and we are very pleased with the work.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Fast Data Science was extremely responsive, and available for calls, sharing of information, and even presentations with our global team on a regular basis. We communicated over email and through Zoom, and our communications were always efficient, informative, and enjoyable.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I had no idea the power of data science technology! What Fast Data Science was able to do for my organization, in such a short amount of time, was unbelievable and opened our eyes to what is possible in the future for our other campaigns. We were also really happy to have found a company that was able to communicate with our team of non-data scientists in a way that was clear and totally understandable.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We were extremely pleased with every aspect of this project and with our working relationship with the Fast Data Science team.