Matt Brems is a managing partner at the consultancy BetaVector, a member of the distinguished faculty at General Assembly, and the marketing and communications director for Statistics Without Borders. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Franklin College and his master’s degree from The Ohio State University.

As a reader of this magazine, you almost certainly know how valuable smart statistical practices are to making data-driven decisions and how poor practices can quickly lead good efforts astray.

You may recognize high-profile stories of “statistics gone wrong,” like the thousands of people who incorrectly cried foul over Marilyn vos Savant’s “Monty Hall” and “two boys” columns in Parade, or that Sally Clark, Lucia de Berk, and Janet Collins were all found guilty of crimes in part due to invalid statistical inferences.

You likely also have your own experiences! Maybe you’ve seen a colleague improperly generalize results from a sample or you’ve heard clients conflate correlation with causation. To make a long story short, you know firsthand what happens when organizations and teams don’t employ best statistical practices. As a reader of this magazine, it probably drives you nuts!

We have these experiences, too. And at Statistics Without Borders, we help others avoid critical statistical mistakes.

In just about every case, organizations want to use best statistical practices. But many organizations may not have the time, expertise, or financial resources to cut through the noise and understand how to best proceed.

• Prospective clients are continually learning more about the role smart statistical practices play in their organization’s success.
• The rate at which new tools are developed can inflate the perceived importance of tools and diminish the perceived importance of the statistical methods that undergird them.
• Flashy methods, misinformation, and buzzwords contribute to the cacophony of advice out there, making it difficult for clients to know what best practices look like.

In particular, nonprofit and social good organizations are often already strapped for resources, so they tend to be disproportionately likely to need statistical consulting and data support.

That’s where Statistics Without Borders (and you!) come in.

Who Are We?

Statistics Without Borders (SWB) is a team of more than 1,600 volunteers, including statisticians, data scientists, researchers, teachers, psychologists, economists, epidemiologists, consultants, and public health professionals. The vast majority of our projects are completed remotely, enabling us to have a global reach—while 60 percent of our volunteers are based in the United States, our membership spans 60 countries across six continents and 77 spoken languages.

Our volunteers, with diverse backgrounds and experiences, are the true powerhouse behind what we are able to accomplish. Volunteers help us execute our vision, which is that “SWB aims to improve decision-making and knowledge in efforts that promote welfare through the proper application of statistical principles and best practices, where access to such resources is limited.”

We think it’s a great mission! Let’s break that mission down and discuss specifically what SWB does.

What Do We Do?

You name it, we’ve probably done it: 

• Survey sampling in South Sudan 
• Survival analysis in Sierra Leone 
• Monitoring and evaluation in East Africa 
• Time series analysis in Tigray 
• COVID-related data analysis in the Caribbean, United States, and Asia

For the past 11 years, we have volunteered our time and expertise to complete more than 120 projects for organizations around the world. You may recognize some of the organizations we’ve served, like the Save the Children Fund, the World Food Programme, or the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Some organizations may be less familiar to you, like the Asante Africa Foundation, the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, and the American Alliance for pPROM Support. By providing data support and statistical knowledge, our volunteers have empowered these organizations and many others to do more good.

In the last year alone, we’ve worked on more than 20 projects. At this point, you might be wondering: What does a project actually look like?

How Do We Operate?

Right off the bat, we’re different from a lot of statistical consulting organizations in that we operate with a zero-dollar annual budget. That’s right—we’re driven by volunteers who serve in many capacities to bring clients in, finalize what a project may look like, and execute it. (We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the support we get from the American Statistical Association, which subsidizes our website.)

Let’s use the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary as an example to see what a project looks like, start to finish.

Based in Sierra Leone, the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary (TCS) rescues and rehabilitates chimpanzees, conducts wildlife research, and promotes environmental education. Between 2005 and 2016, there was a considerable number of chimpanzees that, unfortunately, died due to a mystery illness. TCS reached out to us in 2016 to see if we could assist them in uncovering causes of the disease.

When TCS reached out to SWB, they spoke with our new client acquisition team. This team explains what SWB does and doesn’t do, and they help vet clients to make sure the client and proposed project both align with SWB’s mission. We found that, yes, helping the sanctuary was a great fit for an SWB project.

Next, the sanctuary was connected with a project manager and statistical expert. (We call these our project and client managers and our statistical consultants—PCMs and SCs for short.) The PCM is an SWB volunteer who is responsible for overseeing the project and ensuring its successful delivery. The statistical consultant is another SWB volunteer who makes sure the project is completed in a statistically rigorous manner.

Once the PCM and SC agreed with Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary about what the deliverables needed to be—in this case, a written report detailing the analyses completed and insights found—the PCM and SC put out a call for volunteers to recruit additional SWB volunteers to staff the project. This team included a medical school professor and a recent industrial engineering program graduate.

Finally, the SWB team assigned to this project worked with the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary to gather medical and environmental data and got to work. Early iterations of the project included summary statistics and a conclusion that more information was needed. Later versions included more complex modeling such as survival analysis via Cox modeling. Throughout this project, one final volunteer completed quality assurance work to independently verify our projects are being completed at a high standard and are thoroughly documented.

After the project work was completed, the team presented and delivered its results to Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary. We formally closed out the project once stakeholders from the sanctuary and SWB quality assurance signed off. In 2018, the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary reached out and asked us to re-engage with them—this time to help them evaluate the effectiveness of one of their environmental awareness campaigns.

We’re always looking for ways to improve. However, after well above 100 completed projects and plenty of satisfied clients—some of whom want us to help again—we have to say we’re immensely proud of the positive impact we’ve had throughout the world over the last 11 years.

But we are just getting started, and we’d like your help.

How Do You Get Involved?

There are three main ways for you to get involved:

Share potential clients with us. We have lots of volunteers, and there’s no shortage of teams that could benefit from some pro bono statistical assistance. If you know of a local community organization that may want some consulting work done or you have a connection with someone at a nongovernmental organization (NGO), we would greatly appreciate your referral. Encourage them to reach out to us or connect us via email at statisticswithoutborders@gmail.com.
Follow us on social media. Engage with us on Twitter at @SWBprobono, find us on LinkedIn, or head to our website.
Perhaps the most obvious way for you to get involved is to volunteer. If the idea of contributing your time as a PCM, an SC, or a quality assurance team member excites you, we’d love to hear from you. Want to just sign up to see if there are any projects that interest you? Check us out! We’ve also got other roles we didn’t mention here. If operations or marketing/communications are more your thing, reach out. As an organization that operates with no money in our annual budget, we rely on the time and talents of our exceptional volunteers. Join us in making better use of data and, in doing so, making the world a better place.

Want to learn more? Check out our other article, “SWB Volunteers Share Experiences, Rewards.”