The Opportunity

We are looking for a manager passionate about how data and emergent technology can be used to solve social problems and create a fairer society. Your work will be varied from leading projects/products to developing our data and digital strategy to coaching and mentoring colleagues.

Data and digital is the major growth area for Social Finance. They’re key ingredients to delivering 21st century services that improve outcomes. Over the next 12-18 months we have an ambitious plan of growing the team, expanding into new social issues, and building international collaborations to bring our approach and model to new countries. A colleague recently said “I joined for the combination of passionate ambition and serious strategy.”

Recent examples of our projects include:

• Using data science to uncover hidden social issues – we analysed local authority social care and education data (bringing together 700 datasets) and did user research with decision makers to find new ways to help reduce exclusions. We showed that girls were actually being ‘excluded’ at a higher rate than boys, but their exclusions were hidden by official definitions. Our findings featured in The Guardian. We’re now helping authorities replicate our analysis and are developing an intervention to support the high-risk students which the analysis identified.

• Changing the social contract between government and residents – We’ve worked closely across councils in Wales to enable adult social care to better communicate and share information with people accessing their services. Our multi-disciplinary team applied user centred design to define the problem, prototype solutions, and build and embed a new digital service. Our approach to share knowledge and skills with partner teams has enabled the service to be adopted by council digital and service teams to improve transparency and trust between people accessing adult social care and councils.

• Improving mental health with better service data – We’ve run a large, national programme called IPS Grow since 2019, which is supporting the NHS and other government departments to significantly increase the number of people with mental health conditions and drug and alcohol addictions who can find and keep fulfilling work.  We’ve developed and currently manage an outcomes and reporting tool which allows services to capture, monitor and respond to their performance data more effectively, improving outcomes for people using the service.

The Role

We are looking for a Manager with data and digital expertise to support the public, social and health sectors improve outcomes for people across the UK and beyond.

We’ve impact strategies around transforming the use of data and digital across services for children and young people (inc. social care and education) and health and adult social care with a focus on addressing inequity in patient experience and outcomes. We’re also looking at emerging impact areas where a different approach is needed to bring services into the 21st century and improve outcomes – including international development, and the environment.

All these strategies share a common focus on enabling our partners to use data and technology to empower people and communities.

Our work is broad – ranging across digital transformation to risk modelling to business intelligence to developing data standards to designing the commercial models for ‘govtech’ products to advising on the ethics of data collaborations, and training partners’ data scientists.

This breadth is intentional. Rather than trying to develop our own leadership in a single area, we are trying to achieve social change. We take on this wide variety of challenges because these challenges are what lie between us and our goals. You will need to be excited by that breadth – and by the frequent need for teams to blend technical with policy and service delivery expertise to identify the right solution.

Ultimately, social impact should be your driver rather than the use of cutting-edge data science approaches or the latest technologies as we are often constrained by the data, technology, and in-house capability of our partners.  This provides you with the opportunity to think of creative ways to work around those constraints and consider that to be part of the fun.

About You

You will have a strong mix of the skills and experiences below and, most importantly, will be excited about the opportunity to learn.

• Delivering Impact – deliver projects/products that enable our partners to more effectively use data and technology to improve decision-making and explain our approach and insights to stakeholders and partners. 

• Providing expertise and advice on data and/or digital transformation programmes – advising partners with a range of capabilities to help solve strategic and operational problems for the public sector, charities, and impact-focused businesses.

• Understanding product development cycles – you’re familiar with the development of data and digital projects and products from blank piece of paper to final solutions whether that is a report, an open-source solution, or a fully hosted web-app.

• Communicating to non-data and tech people – you will need to be comfortable speaking with a range of people and roles, helping them to understand data and technology and taking important decisions from re-designing services or choosing a coding language.

• Supporting our partners – you will love building our partners’ capacity to undertake similar work themselves whether its pairing with their team, launching an apprenticeship programme for data science or open-sourcing solutions so that they’re easy for others to use and build on.

• Managing Ambiguity – you will need to be comfortable with changing approaches as you and the team develop a better understanding of the problem and what might solve it.

• Refining and implementing our strategy - working with the senior team to shape our strategy and roadmap for projects and products from health and social care, children services, international development and more. 

• Supporting colleagues - helping them to structure their work and check that the outputs are production/publication ready.

• Managing in an Agile way – manage ambiguity, know what everyone is working on, and ultimately enable the team to deliver social impact.

Considering ethics - think about and explore the ethical implications of data, technology, and society – e.g. how design decisions exacerbate or counter problems such as structural racism and algorithmic bias, or the tendency towards state surveillance of disadvantaged people.

The following is desirable, but not essential:

• Contributing to open-source projects – increasingly a key part of our impact strategy.

• Navigating projects with complex legal and ethical considerations.

• Working with the public and social sector – inc. experience with the Government Digital Service standards, government, ICO and NHS best-practise guidance on data ethics, sharing, and analysis.

• Working in multi-disciplinary teams - working with user researchers, designers, developers, business analysts and others.

To view the full job advert please visit: https://www.socialfinance.org.uk/careers/vacancies