Mastrodomenico is a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society as well as owner and founder of his statistical consulting company Global Sports Statistics.. He is also the Chair of RSS’ Statisticians for Society initiative since its inception in 2017. He is also an RSS Statistical Ambassador, which involves regular work with the media in assisting with their reporting of statistical issues.
Episode Description
Data can be powerful and persuasive rhetorical tools for nonprofits as they explain the work they day and ask for monetary support from various entities, but not all nonprofits can afford to hire a statistician to crunch numbers for them. An organization in the UK is working to meet the statistical needs of nonprofits and is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Robert Mastrodomenico.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington: Data can be powerful and persuasive rhetorical tools for nonprofits, as they explain the work they do and ask for monetary support from various entities, but not all nonprofits can afford to hire a statistician to crunch numbers for them, an organization in the UK is working to meet the statistical needs of nonprofits and is the focus of this episode of stats and stories when we explore the statistics behind the stories, and the stories behind the statistics I'm Rosemary Pennington stats and stories is a production of Miami University's Department of Statistics and media journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me our regular panelists John Bailer Chair of Miami statistics department and Richard Campbell, former chair of media journalism and film. Our guest today is Robert Mastro Domenico Mastro Domingo is a Fellow of the Royal statistical society, as well as owner and founder of global sports statistics. He's also been the chair of RSS as statisticians for society initiative. Since its inception since 2017 Mastro Dominica also is an RSS statistical Ambassador which involves regular work with the media and assisting with their reporting of statistical issues, Robert thank you so much for joining us today.
Robert Mastrodomenico: Thank you for having me.
Pennington: Could you just describe how statisticians for society started
Mastrodomenico: A funny thing that I was, I've been with the RSS doing kind of volunteer work for 10 years I think about that. And I was just getting I just been a trustee trustee for I think five years and I was gonna have a little bit of a break and someone who I knew and I'd work with them but like, we want to set up an initiative to work with charities, would you mind helping us out, pick some people to be involved. And so I just did it as a kind of small favor to help get it started and the more I kind of learned about what they wanted to do, the more I thought well actually I should probably stay on and the idea was to kind of leverage the RSS membership, and all the fellows to try and connect up charities, with statisticians and essentially be that kind of middle piece in it to kind of facilitate that. And the idea kind of blossomed from there and we know it ran, we started out, we got some people involved from the society, volunteers, like myself, along with staff members and the kind of the concept of statisticians for society was born.
Bailer So can you talk a little bit about the some of the groups that you've worked with, you know, before I mean I'm dying to ask also about how you implemented it. I'm also dying to ask if there was a statisticians against society but I think we could we could be postpone that to later but but in terms of the groups, let's let's just start with what are some of the organizations that you all have been involved in helping.
Mastrodomenico: So, the kind of the approach we initially took was you know we want to help charities who maybe don't have the resources to help themselves so we set a limit on kind of charity turnover what you're allowed to kind of be making, to, you know, sign up for this initiative. And so, we're aiming at kind of smaller charities and we still do now and so the initial kind of thing was we were looking we just kind of put the word out there were the charities who wanted to do this and just kind of used our contacts that we had at the society so a lot of the kind of staff members who help administer this, they just kind of use contacts we had from various charities just to see can we get the word out and would people do this. And it was the unknown as well you know we came into this, trying to do something not knowing if this was succeeding how popular it be. And I think initially there was kind of one instance we had a charity sign up and they did it, they were doing an interview on radio four and kind of spoke about this BBC Radio for for you guys in America, and from there we just started getting lots of lots of interest and in the UK, there's a lot of kind of groups and events you can go to to kind of promote yourself within the charity sector. So, bit by bit we started doing more and then we start getting traction with, you know, charities signing up with, you know, wanting to do work, and the variety, it was astounding. You just have lots of different kind of charities, all wanting some kind of statistical help or thinking they needed some kind of statistical help and it was that kind of side, that you know, got the thing going and kind of helped us form what the initiative was because when we started off you have this big idea of, you know, you want to help charity sounds great. And then you start doing it, you're like, Well how do we actually do this, and that's where we kind of learned over time, and where you know, over this period we've refined the approach and kind of learned how we can help help those charities to help themselves and help the volunteers and that you know it's been a learning process for myself or the people that say all the volunteers who've been involved in the kind of administration side of it, and the volunteers and charities who are actually doing it we're all we've all kind of learned, and we've got some kind of point today where I think we have some really powerful that, you know, works. So I just did a quick follow up Sorry, sorry, Richard I beat you to the punch here. But, so, who was the, who was the charity that gave you the shout out on radio four. And what did you do for him. It's gonna be really bad, I say, We've scoped I've been personally I've probably scoped about 3040 charities. So it might be easier if I explained the process because then you'll kind of realize why I. It's very, I can remember people who's on it and I can relate with the people who've done it if I meet them. But the charities themselves, we deal with lots of them so the approach that generally happens is the charity will we got the word out about this initiative, a charity will then send for an application year we think we need some help, and that will go directly to the RSS that will get dealt with this couple of people RSS you kind of working on this and they do great work. They'll take the, the initial kind of form that they send in, and that will get fed into somebody who's on the scoping committee so my kind of role when I first got involved was to set up this committee so this is a group of kind of statisticians and they're all way more eminent domain, you know, we've got former IRS presidents very eminent people still in that kind of that, that work now so you know we've got some great people and what will happen is one of those people will pick up this query, and we'll have a call with him. So, and I've done quite a few because initially when we were looking to get this going. I was around and yeah, I've actively given my time to do this so you just speak to the charity, the charity will then you're kind of to a conversation just to get an idea of what they want, because, you know, as statisticians when you work in a kind of a similar way you've got lots of stuff this it's really easy to know what you want, you know you get in a groove of what you're doing a charity you might have two or three people, and they've got they don't know what they want, they know they might have day or they, some of them do know what they want in that they need to produce reports or produce stuff for reasons. Others like we've got surveys, we've got the state of what can we do, How can we get insight. So, the stage one is that kind of scope. So, we'll, and I think I've scoped probably 3040 different charities so quite a lot of variety and with that you kind of put this together into some kind of form, which is then used to try and recruit in a volunteer to do the work. So this is where we kind of make use of the network so we'll then send out a request to the membership to see who wants to do it and you know a lot of the time we'll get a lot of people who show interest and they'll send a CV covering of, you know, their suitability to it and certain projects will suit certain skill sets you know if you've got a medical base project, then we're looking for somebody with a specific skill set if we've got survey analysis, looking for those people we try and make facilitate that and make it as easy as possible so when you apply you know what you're getting into. From there, then that individual who's chosen will meet with the cherry they will then come up with an idea formulate a bit more if need be, formalized work, go and do the work, a review panel will then come back and check that, just to confirm everything metal what was agreed at the start, and then you get to a point where you've got happy charity hopefully you've got an extra piece of work, and we've kind of formed a relationship. So, going back to your original question. I do lots of those. And then when you, when somebody dies, you're like, oh man, you remember the charity when they come to speak by but it's very easy to forget the names because there's so many of them. And that's wonderful.
Richard Campbell: I thought it was interesting looking at the website Rob, that the charities, understand that a lot of times to get good donations, they need to have data and statistics and I thought that was one of the things that, looking at some of your projects that sort of came up over and over. I thought that was an important this recognition that we're gonna need from donors they're going to want numbers, they're going to want to see data on this. Yeah, maybe you could talk about, have you worked on a specific project I was kind of interested in the, in the Consortium for street children, and how you count street children how that worked. I don't know if you can speak to that or not, so you know I think that was one of my pride and that's not so in terms of my role is usually the kind of, I'm involved at the start where I kind of speak with charity but I'm pretty sure I was involved in this some way because I do remember, or at least this was brought up at some of our meetings in terms of how this is done and you know the approach is around that. I will take the credit for doing the work there'll be a volunteer within the society who's taken the time and given a lot of time to do it.
Mastrodomenico: From my point of view and the kind of scoping committee what our role is is just to kind of flesh out a bit of that project and I think going back to your earlier point where you're talking about charities, becoming a bit more savvy about needing data and how they report it. That kind of thing, you know, it really impresses me with the charities that come in to us, especially when you see sometimes how small they're, you know, they're trying to do really good work on limited budgets and they know they need this but they don't know specifically but they've got you know there's enough of a kind of knowledge that this is something I want and my kind of role in a lot of in the kind of help process is to help them help themselves to get the idea out because they might come to us with some that they want. And actually, you can kind of tell initially that Ada might not be possible or be that's not really kind of what they want and the more you speak to them making any kind of consultancy type environment, you get more out of them and they kind of do the work for you, you're just asking the right questions, getting them to think in that kind of way. And as part of the kind of initiative, one of the things we'll be looking at rolling out next year is some resource for charities that are online allow them to kind of help themselves help make those decisions because what we're not trying to do is teach society statistics. And I think that's a really kind of important part that that skill of being a good statistician is, you still need to statistician, we can give you that. But what we've made we can do is help you to figure out some of the bits before you need us or need the statistician to help you make better decisions and understand what you've got and maybe what you can do so that's what we're working on at the moment and looking to roll out next year which we're quite excited about. And that kind of resource more focus towards the charities, because obviously there's lots of statistical teachings and resources just in the RSS as a whole. But some of this really focus for them that helps them get engaged with it, not that they're not already I kind of think we've already touched on charities knowing that they need to do it but given, letting them empower sounds a bit more and you know, really take advantage of what they've got.
Pennington: You know it's a. I know that the RSS has some, some really great resources out there, there's resources for journalists resources for teachers. I'm curious what kind of when you're talking about some of this, this future work is these resources for charities, can you give kind of an example or two of some of the, what would be part of those resources.
Mastrodomenico: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm as it's kind of as I'm chairing this kind of initiative I'm kind of involved now all levels I've infiltrated every level of statistisches for society. I'm very much hands on with this part so there's a, it's a very cognitive choir especially we have another subcommittee we did our many committees doing this, have individuals again volunteers who give up their time and we're just trying to put together resources. So a lot of this will be online a lot of this will be around case studies maybe videos on, you know, using data collecting data or things that you need to think about before that, before you get to the point of us because what we found, probably for experience and you know we're over 50 projects in the number changes, you know, all the time I can barely keep up with it is that actually you find some charities come to us too late, if they if they knew earlier that they needed us. They could have taken the steps to kind of either get us involved earlier, or have you know done things a little bit differently, you know, an example is surveys, so we had one charity will remain nameless and they were very very nice and he did a survey analyzing, very quickly, and, you know, they came to us and they'd already designed a survey and I'm pretty sure they're already implementing it and we're like, we can help you, but ideally, you should have come to us pre that, but they don't know and it's like, how can we help get that out and it's you know using examples from charities that we've worked with positive case studies people kind of talking about their experiences and using kind of common, you know, not statistical techniques but the understandings that you need to be more savvy with they were just trying to make you understand what you've got, not necessarily show you how to do a T test or you have 10 p values we don't want you to be doing that we just want you to know how to you should be dealing with collecting storing all those bits of the data that you can do yourself and help the charity just become a bit more savvy with that you're listening to stats and stories Our guest today is Robert Mastro dimenticato Chair of RSS is statisticians for society initiative. Now, this work is done pro bono by the statisticians, which I think is really interesting and I saw when I was reading up on the projects website, sort of the comparison to sort of the fact that like lawyers do pro bono work, and why you know there's something that maybe statisticians should consider doing too. Are there many projects like yours where statisticians are doing work pro bono and I wonder if you've seen what the reaction has been in the sort of statistician world, to what the project is involved in doing and whether there's been more of an effort to create these kinds of things. Since your initiative began. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say we are the originators of doing this obviously from a kind of statisticians, there wasn't anything like this before but the O r society have their own similar initiative, there are other initiatives around which a similar. We're trying to fill our space and do our part, you know, take care of the statistics side of it but there are other kinds of initiatives that we can kind of, if we get a query for example and it's more economic space, we can pass you on to somebody you could help that or if we think it's more operational research will pass you that, and we input we work together with, you know, we're all trying to kind of all we want to do really is help the charities help themselves so there's no kind of need for us to do things that we think someone else can do better. So, the guys at the RSS have been really good in kind of connecting with other groups so we've got really good networks out there and the kind of the charity sector within the UK has a lot of kind of initiatives, people you can speak to events we present various places to kind of get out what we're doing, but there are lots of people who are trying to help and you know, it's, it's that bit of trying to get yourself out to the charities, is the hardest bit the market because if you're a small charity, how can we make ourselves aware to you. And I think that's the kind of in general thing that, you know, we're always trying to be more forward facing but in the right way you know it's not being say on Twitter promoting yourself maybe doesn't help a charity scout for volunteers who are on Twitter all the time reading about this, we need to kind of get to them so we're looking at kind of how we can take advantage of the fact that RSS throughout the UK has different kind of local groups. You know concentrations of fellows all around the country. So we want to take advantage of that and kind of spread the word as much as possible.
Campbell: Rob Can you give us an idea of how many statisticians are actually involved in this project, you said they're from all over the country.
Mastrodomenico: Yeah, in our membership. So, the membership of the RSS is a is obviously nationwide so when we have, we have international members, obviously, we have members in the US just as as a will have member, you know, people will share those kind of memberships we have members in Europe, Africa all around. But obviously the kind of structure of the RSS kind of historically is you would have specialist sections you kind of have groups of volunteers who will run events for safe sports for example of which, Vice Chair of the sports section, but we also have local groups who will run events in their areas and you know, that kind of have essentially RSS events for people who West Midlands or Scotland, Glasgow, Edinburgh, so we've got concentrations all around so it's how we can kind of connect all the dots to make sure at each level we're getting the word spread, because you can do it through kind of promotional materials or going to conferences, which we do lots of we try it you will speak at various conferences, to try and you get an email, but we also need to take advantage of the fact that we're kind of nationwide, the terms of the initiative itself is open to anybody who's a member of the society who signs up to the mailing list to obtain a request. So, when we get a request in from a charity if it goes through the scoping process I scoped it for example, we've got something that we want to get a volunteer for as long as you're a fellow a member of the RSS and you've subscribed to the mailing list so you sign up for your RSS. org. That UK, then you can basically receive messages to say you know we've got the project. Here's a project, do you want to apply and you can apply that way. So it's open you have to be part of the RSS so we want, you need to be a member it's not open to anybody. So that's probably, you know the one block for people but actually, you know, there's a lot of statisticians involved. And I think we're at kind of four or 500 people have signed up to this. And a lot of it is just us also making the society members aware, because you know, at any one time we might have 8000 members in the society, I don't know what the current number is but you know we we were doing our work to make it more. You know, more known to the members because in my head. Everybody should be signed up really if they can you don't necessarily need to do anything but the more people we can get it out to the better. But this initiative has kind of grown from a pilot scheme, but it was set up to now something where we've got funding for the next five years. So, that's also part of our kind of growth is not just to get it out to more charities but to get it. You know seen by members within the society because probably like the NSA, you know, there's lots and lots of things going on and so it's not necessarily cutting through the noise but just kind of making sure we can get it in front of all the members and people are kind of seeing what's there because it may not be for every member of society because people join for different reasons but I think it will be something that a lot of people would be very interested in, at least knowing about and seeing what comes through.
Mastrodomenico: Because what we kind of hope is, we'll match you up when we get somebody who wants to do the work that they have a genuine interest in that kind of charity. And we've seen that a lot people signing up because it's something they're passionate about, you know, an area that they want to kind of work in and that makes it all the better because we can kind of cultivate those long term relationships, kind of, if you think of us as the people who are setting up the work, then once the work is done, we don't want you just to stop. Yeah, we don't want to start fishing a charity, not to ever speak again. So it's not like we're, but we want you to kind of have those long term relationships and, and as the kind of, we're starting to see that with more and more complete projects that we do a kind of review call and it's great to see Oh, we're going to do this next we're going to do that next. And it's like, you've made a bit of a difference which is really cool. That's, that's really neat I love the fact that that you've got this coordinated effort. I mean, there have been efforts like this I mean, for example the HSA had the statistics in the community, or statcom effort that's that started at Purdue, and it was basically student volunteers that were looking to quote they were providing pro bono stack consulting to local nonprofit governmental and community service organizations, but I think that, you know, what you have is the centralized coordinated effort I like the idea that that you have this Clearinghouse that you're kind of centralized then you're doing, it's it's it's a it's more of a coordinated as opposed to a distributed response which I think may be pretty effective because a small charity may know about RSS but may not know about what is a statistician, and where do I find them locally that appeals, I'll tell you one thing I really liked about the way that you all report your case studies, you know that you ended up partitioning it into the request the approach the result, and impact and benefits, and I that now all of a sudden I thought, Hmm, maybe I'm going to change the way I think about my data practicum classes and some of the ways that we might talk to our classes about, about how they would build up the results so I think that was really nicely framed So can you talk a little bit about, You know how populate those those components as part of interactions with the charities. So, I'm not going to take credit for all the case studies and how they are Amir Akhrif who from the RSS you deserve a big shout out. I've been involved along the hallway and they're not statisticians by trade but they help all of us who are kind of all the volunteers, they kind of keep us along the right path and help us kind of do what we need to do. And that kind of level of coordination is key. So those guys are key so they've got their shout out on this, but we kind of report along the way so one of the things we've learned since we started is how we just keep a track of things because it kind of like in any business like if you've got lots and lots of projects if you're if this is like a consultancy, I kind of think of it as we've got lots of projects go and we've got some centralized people within the RSS who are trying to manage all of that. But we kind of need that level of accountability. Not necessarily. If it goes wrong, but we also, we need to know things do slow down, and we've learned that for experience, sometimes you know when you're relying on volunteers and charities that you know people's what was important to them, changes you know you can have something like a global pandemic and your priorities may change and we've seen that with certain charities who you know this isn't this they may have signed up to kind of do something but this isn't really top of their priority right now. And so it's that kind of approach of just logging, all the steps and we've kind of as we've grown from a scoping committee. We've added a review committee, we've added certain meetings along the way that we've learned from experience and so, and the kind of the kind of thing I talked about earlier where we have a kind of end of project meeting where we kind of really get to understand what happened what was the results, all of that kind of allows us to come up with this kind of approach where we can kind of really show what happened and show it step by step, and we do talks where we get volunteers to talk about their experiences how it was for them.
We cannot we also do for charities we like how it's how is it for you and it's different for everybody. It's different for a scopa reviewer somebody who's done the work and a charity who was involved in it, and with the kind of help of centralized staff the RSS and the volunteers who are scoping and reviewing. We kind of formulated a kind of neat way of work and this seems to be, you know, we seem to have some down now that allows us to, you know, work with lots of charities simultaneously and provide that level of kind of support and service that you know they need on both sides, because it's as much about us supporting the statistician as it is the charity. Everybody's involved in this and you know the statisticians giving away their time for free. They're doing this work, we need to support them and allow them to work as well as possible with that charity so we've through experience and, you know, I'm not going to say we have this down perfect straightaway you know we learn by doing. And every time you know we do, we did a project, we learn how better to do it. And, you know, getting lots and lots of opinions of a lot of kind of people who are passionate about this, and even charities feeding back into us is kind of allowed us to create something that we hope can grow and work and for us. Have you heard any, any new kind of projects that have emerged as a consequence of these. These COVID-19 days in which we live, and they have this motivated certain specific specific kind of questions from some, some charities. You say, how is it for us, we're feeling the effects of it in terms of number of charities who are coming to us. Because, as expected you follow scheme, everything we've had in the UK in terms of people kind of, you know, batten down the hatches and just trying to get through it and I did an event with you know our society and a few other charities where we were talking about the effects of COVID and trying to kind of look at how data can be used and what people would want to do with it and we've seen our numbers go down over this period.
Mastrodomenico: Luckily, the way it works is we have a you know a kind of a lag effect in that we're, we're still fairly busy with projects ongoing, but there will come a time where actually are these projects going to dry up but then what will probably happen is this will open up opportunities for charities and maybe weren't eligible, because of turnover and that kind of effect. So what we're trying to do is prepare ourselves for kind of what's going to come out of this where people will need to do stuff, and we fully expect it to you know, charities will need to be using data and the COVID effects may be things that they will need to start showing as and when they need to do end of year reports or they're looking at the effects of it. One of the things we have seen is kind of a lot of charities UK wide kind of really increased their digital capacity, and that's probably one of the biggest things that's happened nationwide with us during this. And so that kind of makes things a lot easier. We can whisper speaking with charities, who maybe before didn't have, you know, online facilities to do in conferences meetings and you know or storing their data in certain ways everyone's kind of adjusted in the UK to this kind of remote working, and I think that's going to have a positive net effect on you know how charities work because we had seen before. The way charities stored and use data, maybe wasn't optimal but they seem to be kind of upscaling themselves from just, you know, the small sample sizes we're dealing with obviously I'm not going to make huge inferences of that.
Mastrodomenico: But that might kind of hope is that out of this we can help more charities when they need that help with it and we're sad. We're waiting, you know, we will be there for them when they want it, so hopefully we can help as many charities as possible.
Penington: That's all the time we have for this episode of stats and stories Robert thank you so much for being here today.
Mastrodomenico: Thanks for having me.
Pennington: Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple Podcasts, or other places where you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your emails to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.