Humanitarian Data Analytics: Data Science Consulting for Non-Profits
The goal of ROM2 consulting is to bring data science, software and apps to augment decision-making from data for use by non-profits, especially in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. Our team’s background combines major data science projects, including models to prevent powers outages in British Columbia to guide the most useful distribution of repair crews and models to predict and remove carcinogenic electrical devices, experience in reviewing data science publications at international data science conferences, and in volunteering work to consult and guide non-profits with fundraisers and grant applications.
To start a consultation, you are welcome to review our consulting areas before contacting us. We welcome exploring new data applications with our clients to serve their goals meeting the broader community needs:
Finding Research Partners: This option relates to connecting you to existing data science groups in British Columbia and helps you more quickly discern the feasibility of such collaborations. Some example questions are: how can you leverage technology to guide your non-profits efforts, is there a university or company in the area that would be willing to work on your idea to improve your services, or Is there enough accurate data for this prediction to lead to better net outcomes. Other options include leveraging existing data resources, such as repositories of weather and demographic information that leads to data guided decision support.
Non-Profit Tailored Data Science: We can investigate and solve a problem of sifting through and leveraging data. Some possibilities are analyzing existing databases or files for specific patterns, converting this data into a more useful form, or applying the fanciest,most buzzword filled modeling to help predict future events of interest to your charity (e.g., which people should be contacted for donations). Our team could even investigate developing an app or website* for a charity event you are thinking of running to help improve event engagement.
Product and App Development: One option for projects that require a significant investment is to waive the consulting fee and instead use a split funding model. For example, ROM2 consulting could develop software for your problem then offer it to the wider volunteering community as an app or software that would become available to other non-profits. Any profit from this collaboration would go partly towards your organization, at least 50% of it, and the other percentage would help fund ROM2’s addiction to designer board games. We believe more in-depth projects will be valuable and profitable to the community at large and help maintain your organization’s funding. An example project may be designing chatbots for your website that would help direct users to certain efforts based on their responses and the sentiments encoded in their answers. Another example may be to develop software to interpret and identify homeless in images to help with homeless counts.
Our company mission is to address how data science can be used with a humantarian mindset to serve community needs and not just for-profit needs: to create software dedicated to non-profits organizations is one avenue. The founder, the Ryan Owen McBride in ROM2, has been the past president of a consulting dedicated rotary group (Rotary Community Corps of Burnaby) and is currently Director of Public Relations at Rotary Burnaby. More details on the founder’s professional and academic background is here.
*Note that website design is obviously not one of our specialties.