The Better Deal for Data: a Foundation for Trust
M Celine Takatsuno | March 27, 2025
Note: In the following essay we reference the eight Better Deal for Data™ commitments originally proposed in our April 2024 white paper. In December 2025, we released the BD4D™ Commitments as a set of seven refined commitments.
Introduction
Over the course of the past eighteen months, the Better Deal for Data team has been immersed in a process of foundational research and learning. We’ve published a whitepaper introducing the project concept to a trusted network of innovators, philanthropists, policymakers, and technologists across the global data and technology-for-good spectrum. We have conducted a broad literature review, studying data contexts, licensing, and stewardship. And, we’ve published a first iteration of the Better Deal for Data Commitments: a set of eight, easy-to-understand commitments based on principles of responsible data collection, governance, and sharing.
Along the way, several key questions and themes have emerged. Over the coming months, we’ll explore the most common (and sometimes the most challenging) of these, in a series of short essays we call our ‘Major Questions Papers’. We begin here by addressing one of the most fundamental questions we receive: how do we define the data, and the parties, in a Better Deal for Data?
Trusted Data and the Social Sector
There’s no question that data holds incredible value. In the social sector, data can be used to define problems to be solved, inform interventions and solutions to those problems, and measure the effectiveness of programs and services. It can be leveraged to identify new donors or grantmaking opportunities or increase operational efficiencies. And, when trusted data is shared across the sector, its potential to positively impact people’s lives grows exponentially.
But what makes for trusted data? In our desk research, and in dozens of conversations with real world data stakeholders, we’ve identified that trusted data is transparent about three core elements:
- Provenance: that the origin and source of the data, along with any adaptations or material amendments, are known and trustworthy.
- Stewardship: that the data have been collected, curated, processed, and managed following ethical principles for consent, and recognized standards for data protection, privacy, and security.
- Agency: that an individual or community has the power to access and control data they have provided or that have been collected from them.
The growing awareness of the vast potential for positive impact through nonprofit and philanthropic data sharing has given rise to numerous managed platforms. Projects like the Giving Tuesday Data Commons, the Philanthropy Data Commons, or the TechSoup Data Commons for Civil Society enable charitable organizations, funders, service providers, and others to contribute and subscribe to aggregated datasets for good.
Cross-sector coalitions such as the Nonprofit Open Data Collective, The Center for Open Data Enterprise, or Microsoft’s Open Data Community Kit develop frameworks and resources for using nonprofit open data, defined as “data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.”1 However, not all data should be open, especially in the social sector.
With their focus on data structures, licensing, and technical interoperability, initiatives such as these make important mechanisms for nonprofit data research available to a broad audience. Yet this approach is limited. Without a common standard guiding ethical data collection, stewardship, and human agency, they lack a critical social contract with the individuals and communities their datasets represent. This is the foundation that the Better Deal for Data provides.
A Foundational Promise
“We make the following commitments to You, all of the individuals or organizations whose data we touch. We make these commitments to You about Your Data which is collected, analyzed, stored, and/or shared…”
The model Commitments are designed to be adopted by the smallest, local nonprofit, who has neither the expertise nor the resources to take on the challenge of data governance, as well as the large, global NGO with its own legal and data teams. Currently, they are formed as a plain language agreement – a foundational promise made by a socially minded organization knowingly collecting, using, and/or sharing raw data (the “We”), to those individuals and communities from whom the data are directly collected (the “You”). We continue to consider how the Better Deal might be applied in cases where data are collected indirectly; this ‘downstream data use’ includes data collected about a person or community from another source, and will be discussed in a future essay.
The “Data” itself takes many forms, with programmatic data perhaps being the most familiar. For instance, the data might be demographic information about the people an organization serves, intake data collected by a case manager from the families they support, or monitoring and evaluation data required for grant reporting. Nonprofits also gather information about their individual donors, details like financial wealth, giving history, or occupation. And, most organizations collect and share personal and employment information about their advisors, board, and staff, sometimes as a matter of public record.
Data may also be collected from a community about its culture, economy, or language. A farmer or cooperative might provide information about their land, operations, or yield. Data may be given directly, in a spoken or written interview; collected digitally, through a chatbot or online survey; or even gathered remotely, through a sensor or a drone.
Some of this data are sensitive, and could result in harms if not held responsibly. Often this data has as much potential for exploitation as it does for good. And all of this data represent real human lives and livelihoods. The social contract that the Better Deal presents requires that data are used with intention and a duty of care. Thus, the first Commitment captures the core of what it means to adopt the Better Deal: “We are using Your Data to benefit You, Your community, humanity, and the planet; not for private gain or profit.”
For those who use and share data, the Better Deal affirms provenance, and that the data was freely given. To those whose data are collected, it communicates that their data will be stewarded in a way that protects them, and offers them both access and agency. Finally, in a time when technology increasingly enables even the most sensitive data to be indirectly collected, combined, and tracked for power, surveillance, or commercial benefit, it provides transparency, and trust, to all the data’s stakeholders.
A Better Deal in Context: What If?
To learn about the many data collection and sharing challenges faced by nonprofit organizations around the globe, we’ve spent nearly a year engaging with more than a hundred social sector leaders, asking what type of data they wish to collect and share, the challenges they face in doing so, and the greater benefit to be gained if it were easier to (ethically) do so. This has given us a broad view across the many contexts where a Better Deal for Data could have tremendous impact if widely adopted. These are just a few of the ‘what ifs’ that we are hearing from the field:
- What could happen if a philanthropic institution offered its grantees a way to ethically collaborate based on shared constituent, donor, or program data?
- How might an organization collecting wildlife, plant, and land information to support agriculture in three continents communicate its data policies and practices in places where few households read, write, or use digital technologies?
- Can a group of small, community-based nonprofits in an urban US city agree upon guidelines for responsible data collection, so that they can share information, leverage scarce resources, and ultimately co-create stronger opportunities for the people they serve?
However, the Better Deal is not one-size-fits-all. Just as data are complex, so are the many contexts in which data are collected and shared. Data collection protocols in health and human subjects research projects, for example, require extensive oversight and formal review by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) or other similar research ethics body. Though it addresses data use in research, the Better Deal is not intended to replace an IRB review for those projects that require one. Rather, Commitment Seven is intended to assure an individual participating in even more general research projects that their identity will be safeguarded, and that they will have access to the final work: “If You allow research with Your Data, we will follow best practices around the anonymization of personal data, and published research results will be made available to You for free.”
Similarly, specific sectoral or regional data protection regulations might apply to data used by organizations in education or finance, or those working in specific states, provinces, or countries, or even transferring data between them. In some cases, the individual or community providing data to an organization may also be subject to social expectations, institutional rules, or statutory codes. Regulatory and other requirements applicable to all parties to data sharing are considered in Commitment Six: “We will protect and steward Your Data and comply with applicable privacy laws, but You may have privacy obligations as well.”
Conclusions and Questions
We often say that the Better Deal sets a floor, not a ceiling. By providing a clear set of principles for data governance that can be adopted across communities and organizations, we seek to provide the foundation for a shared commitment to good data stewardship, transparency, and trust. And, while our approach may seem simple, none of the questions about the data in the Better Deal for Data are straightforward. They are interwoven, and at times, quite knotty. In future essays, we look forward to exploring issues of nonprofit data and funding, data sovereignty in a regulated world, social sector data in AI, and more. We invite and welcome your feedback, your data stories, and yes, your questions, as we continue to co-create this work.
iOpen Knowledge Foundation. What is Open Data?. Open Data Handbook. https://opendatahandbook.org/guide/en/what-is-open-data/