DataKind UK has been supporting charities, local government, and social enterprises to use data and data science since 2013. Working with skilled volunteers, we help charities to discover more about their service users, improve their processes, and get closer to reaching their mission with the power of their own data.
As support services moved online during the switzerland rcs data pandemic, and digital becomes the default mode of communication, more charities and public services than ever before find themselves collecting records of conversations from webchats, or phone calls. As well as containing important information about beneficiaries or service users, this ‘text data’ holds vital insights about their needs and impact. In recent years, many organisations have begun to analyse this text, and gain in-depth insights about their work.
But this kind of analysis can be challenging for many reasons. Records of conversations are likely to contain sensitive, private, or upsetting material. Qualitative data like text can have a lot of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which needs to be approached with extreme caution. This is particularly important if the people the data is about or from are vulnerable individuals, including children.
How can you tackle these challenges to better support your service users? This blog looks at the risks of using sensitive data for analysis, and gives our recommendations on how they can be overcome.