Mandy Burns (Variety)
Data consultancy company, eliiza, has partnered with not-for-profit service provider Data4Good to assist Variety, the Children’s Charity in monitoring where funding and grants are being distributed.
Data4Good, along with expert data analyst volunteers from eliiza, partnered with Variety Victoria to increase their insights on where grants are being distributed.
The project analysed Variety's grant programs to individual children over the past seven years to highlight areas that may need increased focus and to prove that there was no hidden bias.
The project included data enablement, exploratory data analysis, overlaying population data, developing visualisations including maps, writing a summary report and building interactive dashboards to enable continued insights and a data conscious approach to granting.
The first part of the project reviewed historical grants awarded for kids in need.
Analysing the individual grant assessment process, eliiza was able to use data from historical grants, ABS data and the data in application to uncover any unconscious bias and provide a process on how the data can assist with proactively removing this during the process of application.
The data helped show under-represented geographies, ensuring those that needed it most were getting the funding and highlighted any trends in comparison to ABS data.
Thanks to ongoing Data4Good volunteer Robin Visser, eliiza was able to utilise his previous work in calculating LGA statistics.
The project continued with data governance improvements, bringing disparate data sources into a centralised data set.
This data governance assessment extended to the review of the Variety application questionnaires where duplicate data was removed and best practice was shared to streamline the application process and yield better quality data in the future.
“Working with the elliza team enabled us to iterate and collaborate on a project that will have long lasting impact,” Variety Victoria CEO Mandy Burns said.
“Thanks to this project, we now know how we can better target support for kids. We cannot wait to work on further projects to change the world for kids.”
In June last year, Mantel Group, through eliiza, acquired Otso.ai to expand its own machine learning (ML) skillset.
Otso is a ML-as-a-service (MLaaS) provider that specialises in the enrichment and analysis of unstructured text data at scale through natural language processes and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
