You are reading the short textual version of the first season of the podcast “We’ll figure it out”, where we talk about people and projects working for social change. In our third episode we are introducing you to the project called “To be precise”. “To be precise” is a data based project, showing what Russia looks like in numbers.
The project’s target audience is everyone who is interested in data and research about modern Russia, first and foremost, of course, its journalists, researchers, NGO representatives and students. The nonprofit sector uses data in the same way that businesses do. Organizations measure their help in numbers, but the way they do it varies in extent and degree of complexity. Daria Kolenko, a communication manager of “To be precise” tells us how to use data properly and where you can still find accurate data about Russia.
It’s important to have an outside perspective of your work
The major task of our project is to make data on Russia as available and accessible to anyone as possible. We collect data from open sources and then upload it to our website in the format of data-sets, and packages of materials, we also conduct mini-research as well as big research rating the regions all across Russia.
NCOs, just like businesses, need data to make effective decisions, to evaluate the results of their efforts, their actions. And this is the main task of any organization – to understand the context. It is with the help of data that you can make decisions about what can be improved, find where to go, to find some unoccupied niche.
Even if you think you are very well versed in the nuances of the social problem you want to address. Be it direct help, donations, activism – it doesn’t really matter what methods you use. From time to time it’s important to look at your work and your field from an outsider’s perspective, from above, even. That’s where data and research are very helpful, because this is how you can better study your donors, your audience, but also, in principle, get a better understanding of the social problem you are attempting to solve. To understand the goals, the social impact of the organization, to understand where some [non-obvious] problems might arise, to know the fields that are more or less stable and the ones where there are urgent problems to solve.
Relying on statistics in problem solving is cool because it’s about informed decision making. For example, at the beginning of last year we published a great piece on homelessness statistics. At that time, according to the most up-to-date census, the number of homeless people in Russia had decreased sixfold. That is, in 2010 there were 64 thousand of them, and in 2020 – 11 thousand. In St. Petersburg 32 homeless people were registered. Honestly, when I volunteered in “Nochlezhka” (one of the oldest charitable organizations helping the homeless in St. Petersburg and Moscow – Editor’s note), I met many more homeless people in just one day of volunteering. How is it even possible to not work with the data, or rather, analyze it critically? If you look at these statistics, you’ll think that there are 32 homeless people in St. Petersburg. You’ll think that these people just don’t exist. You won’t allocate aid to them, because you won’t understand the scale of the problem. As a result of this approach the problem itself becomes invisible to society.
All data has limitations and peculiarities
We have an amazing team of authors, editors, data analysts. Many freelance authors and 10 people in the core team. And everyone in our team is knowledgeable in one or another topic. Thanks to this, we can cover different areas of work with data in our materials. For example, there are separate experts on HIV data, and there are experts on court data. If I personally or one of our listeners needs to know where the Chelyabinsk Region stands on the gender gap, we also have such studies. Or, for example, to find out the number of orphans in Moscow. All of this can be viewed on the website, because we have people whose expertise allows us not just to throw some data, but also to talk about it from a deeper point of view, to verify it.
The process of data collection is not easy…. Yes, we study the websites of [government] agencies, we look at what data is publicly available and what data we need to request. We analyze each indicator critically, and we have a large fact-checking process for that. This is one of the most important stages before any text or research is released. How it works is that we take the calculations that the author makes on the basis of the data he has received. We then verify these calculations with the help of experts. These are, for example, people who work in research organizations, university employees, and NGO representatives. So, for example, if we have a question about homelessness, we will, of course, go to Nochlezhka to talk to their researchers about how valid this indicator is in general and how best to recalculate it, and what to pay attention to. At the same time, for example, when we publish any indicator, we always spell out its limitations and peculiarities. We always explain if indicators could be manipulated, and why. We state that this indicator should be treated carefully, because there are peculiarities of data collection or specifica of using this indicator.
We construct a non-verbal dialog by publishing data
With research, it’s not so easy to track any direct impact, because as a researcher, you rarely see that any of your specific calculations, data, have had an impact on something. But we have some funny stories about how our data is used. For example, our data is often referred to by the authorities in Russia. And this is quite interesting, because our indicators are, to put it bluntly, not very complimentary and not very pleasant. But representatives of the authorities refer to them in their speeches, in their posts for their Telegram channels.
Recently, if I am not mistaken, the deputy chairman of the State Duma referred to our research on women’s housework and how much it costs. Or our research on HIV, which is definitely discussed in the professional community. Our HIV analysts go to all the conferences, talk to experts and see that everyone is aware of our data. We know 100% that Rospotrebnadzor is aware of what we write about HIV. They know what figures we give and why. It is as if we are building a non-verbal dialog when we publish data. And this dialog, which is often non-existent, can lead to changes.
In 2022, we issued a last major update of the oncology rating. The Leningrad Region had a rather low indicator, because there are specific problems there. And we received a public response to this – the media published an interview with the chief oncologist of the Leningrad region, who accused us of incorrect calculations. In general, he was trying to defend the Leningrad region. Further on, we know for a fact that there has been a movement in the region, additional training in filling out the oncologic register. We hope that there was at least a small impact here. And in general, after the release of the regional rankings, we used to receive requests from local deputies asking them to elaborate on the reasons for the scores in this or that region. So they really often tried to react and do something about the situation. I think it’s great.
Previously we used to regularly release donation benchmarking surveys in collaboration with the Need Help Foundation. We looked at how ordinary everyday people supported certain areas of charity each year. And if I’m not mistaken, in February or March of 2021, advocacy grew strongly in that benchmarking for obvious reasons. And when we released this [benchmarking], the Russian Commissioner for Human Rights wrote on his social networks something along the lines of, “What has the country come to? They donate to human rights, not to sick children!”
We will obviously be affected in the foreseeable future
We do have quite a few difficulties, unfortunately. Lately, especially. The most important problem is that data is simply being closed, it is increasingly disappearing from public access, and it is increasingly difficult to obtain it. It is also important to say that, in principle, not all data is in the public domain, some of it must be requested directly from the agency. That is to say, “Hello, my name is so-and-so, I am from such-and-such an organization, I need such-and-such data for my dissertation, for my article”. And by law they are obliged to give this data. But recently, it seems to me that the main problem is that, generally, agencies have become much worse at providing this data upon request, it is such a global problem of isolation.
At the same time, there are agencies, for example, Rosstat, which gives out all the necessary data perfectly well, but other agencies have started to refuse our requests saying that they cannot give us anything. Some time ago there were some formal reasons they tried to at least come up with, but now they don’t even try to invent anything, they just state that it is not within their competence. The Ministry of Health, for example, does this. And now the Serbsky Institute, which deals with psychiatry, has started to do this, while psychiatric data is super important. The Ministry of Internal Affairs is making it more and more difficult to provide data. This Ministry has access to a lot of important indicators – murders, crime. It’s understandable why they’re shutting down, but still. It seems to me that this all-encompassing trend of closed data will probably only get worse.
We work with foreign statistics on Russia in the format of research. We can check some indicators by independent research centers, take comments from them, look at their analytics. But it is important to understand that independent research centers are most often sociological. And we are, after all, dealing more with administrative data. For example, data from the Ministry of Health is the only data we have on the problems of healthcare in Russia.
[Over the past few years Russia has withdrawn from the various international research groups it used to be a part of]. Frankly speaking, this is unlikely to affect us in any way. These are global studies that will continue to be conducted, it will just be more difficult to use them in the context of Russia. At the same time, Russia still gives its data to international organizations like the UN, WHO, and so on. In the context of withdrawal from international research, the main problem is that Russia is getting isolated as a scientific community. So far this does not apply to our work, but we rely on Russian research a lot. And it is precisely the amount of Russian research that may simply decrease because of that. Due to reduction in funding, lack of resources, and lack of competence. And of course, we will also suffer from this in the foreseeable future.