Getting to the root of data at your organisation - learning from the Wildlife Trusts

​Join the Data Collective for our September lunchtime webinar.

​As charities, we've always had ways of collecting bits of data across our organisations - but not always been able to figure out how to build a healthy and enthusiastic data culture, streamline our data collection, and upskill our staff to be data knowledgeable.

​Over the last couple of years, Wildlife Trusts have been trying to figure this out.

​Alice Kershaw, Head of Digital Transformation at the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts will talk about the journey around data happening in the Wildlife Trust federation. Moving from their 2030 strategy ambition to be more data informed, to developing a roadmap for data culture, running tests of working in new ways across the federation to develop data maturity, skills, ways of working and infrastructure.

​Northumberland Wildlife Trust Board member, Ian Jackson will give a real example of what the journey can look like years on, talking through OneGeology and how learnings from that have fed into what we do at the Trusts.

​This will be a great opportunity to get an honest look into the steps and hurdles to to improving your organisation's data maturity.

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Access information

​This will be run as a Zoom webinar, and there will be an open chat (we promise this time!) and Q&A section. Zoom's automated live captions will also be available.

We take accessibility seriously. If you have any further access requirements, please feel free to say so in the form or email collective@datakind.org.uk for adjustments.

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About the speakers

​Alice Kershaw has been with RSWT for nearly two years, leading the ‘root and branch digital transformation’ elements of their 2030 strategy. She is a specialist in change, transformation and creating a digital culture which creates benefits for all users. She has worked for a wide variety of third sector organisations including small and medium sized charities, national funders and development organisations. She is qualified in process engineering and business analysis and experienced in building and developing products using agile methodologies. 

​An experienced leader who undertook a Clore Cultural Leadership fellowship focusing on partnerships, system thinking and landscape scale working, Alice is used to working with dispersed remote teams and contractors and building up these teams from scratch. She has previously delivered a full systems overhaul including supporting a new data warehouse capability in her previous role. She enjoys facilitating workshops with LEGO and running round lumpy parts of the countryside eating cake.

Ian Jackson worked for the British Geological Survey, initially as a field geologist; he became Director of Information and retired from BGS as Operations Director in 2012. His expertise is in geoscience and environmental information strategy development and delivery, corporate digital transformation, development and implementation of spatial data architectures and infrastructures. At BGS he was responsible for the transition to corporate digital operation, including the delivery and management of national databases for geological maps and other corporate geocience datasets. He has worked as a consultant to government environmental and natural resource agencies in Canada, Australia and the Netherlands and was seconded to the European Commission team responsible for developing and implementing the INSPIRE Environmental Information Directive. He has also worked as a consultant on geoscience informatics to ESRI Global and Rio Tinto and was a member of the US National Academies Committee on “Spatial Data Enabling USGS Strategic Science in the 21st Century”. He developed and led a 120 nation project to improve the accessibility of digital geological map data for the Earth – OneGeology. 

​In 2012 he received the Distinguished Service Award from the UK Geological Society for services to national and international geoscience informatics and the Outstanding Contributions in Geoinformatics Award from Geological Society of America in 2014. He now lives in Northumberland and is a Trustee of the Northumberland Wildlife Trust and author of three geology coffee-table books for lay people; he hikes in northern England most weeks and still attempts to run.