What comes next?

Resources to make your initiative trustworthy, sustainable and scalable

You should now have a clear understanding of your data initiative, and the data landscape and infrastructure that it needs to collect, share and use data to achieve your desired outcomes. Below we provide some tips on how to make this infrastructure sustainable, trustworthy and relevant to its context.

Plan your data management

Designing a data management plan includes outlining the technical processes, roles and governance to effectively manage data, and the resources required to support its collection, access and use.

Creating a data management plan should, ideally, be a collaborative, iterative, process involving all stakeholders in a project. This guide: 'Developing a data management plan', from CABI's Data Sharing Toolkit covers the main elements of a data management plan:

• Assigning roles and responsibilities

• Identifying the audience for the data

• Defining the data to be managed

• Planning and resourcing

• Storing and securing data

Consider the sustainability of the initiative

Achieving impact through your initiative might hinge on your ability to make the initiative sustainable in the long run, or beyond its initial funding. An important consideration for sustainability is the business model of the organisations that steward data infrastructure – including data assets, standards, technologies and policies – longer term. The Sustainable Data Access Workbook can support organisations as they reflect on their current state, and think about their revenue model’s sustainability when looking for long-term grant funding, building a monetisation strategy, or creating a data institution.

Your initiative will also need to be trusted by, and demonstrate trustworthiness to, different actors in your data ecosystem in order to continue to steward, shape or influence the data infrastructure necessary to achieve your desired impact. The Trustworthy Data Stewardship Guidebook provides guidance and tools to support your initiative in assessing the elements of trust that need to be strengthened.

Finally, when strengthening or designing the data infrastructure to tackle the problem, your initiative should consider how this solution can be scaled up across a wider ecosystem or different sectors or contexts. The ‘Scaling data-enabled projects’ checklist can help you address barriers that can hinder the ability to scale data access initiatives and make a high level plan for the resources, technical aspects, knowledge and collaboration you need.

Refine your evaluation framework

Once the initiative is running, you should monitor progress in the indicators defined in your logic model. Some activities or outputs might change during the implementation process, as you learn more and test your assumptions, so you might also refine these indicators, and the logic model itself, over time.

We also recommend communicating progress and outcomes through blogs, use cases or evaluations to showcase how the initiative is evolving, maintain interest and momentum, and share lessons learned from the ground with others.

Additional resources: 360Giving (2020), ‘Data Strategy Canvas’ Energy Systems Catapult (2021), ‘Energy Data Management Canvas’ DAMA International (2017), ‘DMBoK - Data Management Book of Knowledge’