Data Analyst – Member Experience

About Work on Climate

Work On Climate is a leading non-profit focused on building the workforce to solve climate change equitably and justly. You probably know us for our online community that has helped thousands of people find jobs and start companies, highlighted in most major business press, from Fast Company to New York Times. However, our work goes even farther: we are creating change in systems that produce the workforce in the first place – learn more about our approach in this deck.

Most of Work On Climate has been created by a nimble team of highly talented and dedicated volunteers. Supporting the workforce is a uniquely impactful climate solution that helps all other climate solutions, and by volunteering with our team, you can be on the leading edge of this critical work.

About the team

Today our Metrics & Data team is 7 total members from data engineering, data analyst, data visualization, and product backgrounds. We are geo located across Canada, US, Europe. Our standard meeting schedule is once a week, currently on Thursday @8:45am PST.

Our purpose

Our team is responsible for maintaining and evolving the data infrastructure and data products that provide data in a variety of formats used by WoCl teams for operational performance reporting, impact research, ad-hoc inquiries, and new emerging data-enabled pathways to understand and improve community impact.

Role Summary

As part of the Data Analysts group within the Metrics & Data (MD) team, we are growing the team with this new role you will help our community grow and thrive through data-driven insights. You will collaborate with the MD team lead and our other MD data analysts.

This role will focus on helping the Membership Experience (MX) team to uncover meaningful patterns in member journeys, design impactful metrics, and build analytics solutions that directly enhance our climate community’s engagement, retention, and impact potential. Your work will be part of the foundation for strategic decisions that scale our climate action network effectively and inclusively.

Time commitment

5 hours/week consistently for the next 6+ months (We’d like a minimum of 6 months, and love it when volunteers stay on longer)

Additional time during the first 2-4 weeks to complete the onboarding process (setting up tools and access, meeting the team, diving into the data) will set you up for success as a team member.

What’s in it for me?

• Work with and learn from an experienced, friendly, & diverse group of data analysts, data engineers, and product managers
• Meet and network with a much larger team of volunteers across several continents, skillsets, and backgrounds
• Develop your experience in SaaS-style analytics and Google Cloud GCP hosted data architecture
• Own the design and development of data products
• Have a significant impact on a community of 30,000+ members of climate action-oriented professionals

What will I do?

• Understand the wider organizational and team level objectives
• Meet with other teams, with primary focus on Membership Experience team, to understand their data needs and challenges, and how these needs can be met with our data products
• Work within a small, creative, and agile metrics and data team to analyze data and help create data products including reports and self-serve data sets for WoCl teams and organizers
• Understand the data generated through WoCl community activity on Slack, Mailchimp segmentation, and Typeform survey responses
• Work with the Metrics and Data team developers/engineers to design and test new API endpoints required to meet MX team data needs
• Hands-on data audit and analysis using SQL and Looker Studio for data visualization.
• Evolve our current limited documentation to make our data products more accessible and useful to technical and non-technical users
• Contribute to key team decision-making to ensure our tools, code, documentation and team will scale effectively with WoCl data needs.

What skills and commitment do I need?

• Be reliable and tenacious (volunteering can be hard and feel a little different with a globally distributed team across time zones !)
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills. We use Slack, Asana, Notion for async communication. Attend weekly team meetings on Thursday at 8:45am PST on Google meet.
• 4+ years of data analytics experience working with a variety of data sets. Able to understand the complex data and workflows that may not be well documented.
• Where there are gaps in your data skills, willingness and additional time commitment beyond the 5 hrs/week for self-education.
• 3+ years of experience collaborating with technical and non-technical stakeholders to deliver data products
• Strong hands-on experience with our core tools: SQL and MySQL or similar in a cloud environment. Github experience or interest to self-learn is a bonus.
• Experience with data visualization in Looker Studio or similar, data-informed decision making, data product documentation.
• Resourcefulness. Team members own the challenge. We work mostly independently across time zones using our resource tool kits. Team members provide updates regularly on their assigned tasks in Asana. We commit to posting async Slack weekly standup on Wednesday. Each team member provides sync and contributes to forward direction during our weekly team call. We each understand when to reach out for knowledge sharing and problem solving ideas when blocked.
• Bonus qualities: long-term volunteering, working in a virtual team

Common Challenges

• Our goal is to enable decision-making with data, that means ensuring the data products we produce are useful and used. In working with other volunteer teams, you will need patience to sync with their availability, recognize their other priorities, and be creative to understand user needs that may not be evolving.
• Feedback loops on requirements gathering and dashboard design can be slow. We work in agile approach to cycle between tasks based on wider community priorities, volunteer availability across timezones, other data user priorities, and adhoc requests.
• You will need to be flexible and adaptable. Tasks you will be assigned may already be in progress with the status not entirely known due to volunteer turnover and shifting priorities. But as a team we support each other to remove blocks and check our priorities.
• We are a start-up in our data maturity—we are building out how to use data, how best to ingest, transform, visualize it, and what metrics to use. Some things we do might not make sense to you—we’ll welcome your suggestions on how to improve things while still being productive when our data and processes are a work in progress!
• We have a number of data feeds and serve all the various volunteer teams’ needs through direct data access and data visualizations. At the same time, we may not have developed documentation or onboarding processes, so you may need to have some patience and proactivity in getting up to speed.

I’m interested! What do I do?

Yay! We’re excited to learn more about you. Please fill out this application form to tell us about your skills and interests in volunteering with our Metrics & Data team. We are actively looking to fill this role, so will be in touch within 2 weeks after your submission.