Data Processing & Analysis + Data Storytelling

The Advocates for Human Rights

The Mission

The WATCH program, led by the Advocates for Human Rights (AHR), uses court monitoring to advocate for the human rights of survivors of gender-based violence, including domestic abuse, sexual assault, and sex trafficking.

The Situation

WATCH program volunteers attended over 10k court proceedings from 2019-2024, capturing data relating to the operations, safety, and accessibility of court proceedings, trial outcomes, and more.

The data enables AHR to track patterns and trends in court practice. This data is used by AHR to identify issues impacting survivors, guide focus areas for their work, and advocate to courts and other systems actors.

With hundreds of data fields captured across dozens of input forms, data needed to be processed, standardized, and organized in order to prepare it for analysis and extract the insights needed to inform AHR's current and future work.

Solutions Delivered

  • Catalogued, processed, standardized, and consolidated structured and unstructured data across 36 data files, each containing 80+ unique fields.

  • Delivered in-depth analysis outlining key findings, with results curated in a clear and compelling presentation which supports current AHR programming, as well as informing program design and prioritization for future initiatives.

  • Completed an assessment of current data collection processes, providing recommendations to improve data capture strategy to capture clear, meaningful, and actionable data which enables ongoing work and drives impactful outcomes.

"Working with Beth was a wonderful experience, and her assistance was invaluable. Beth’s data analysis expertise helped us organize and decipher years of court observation data. With her guidance we were able to conduct a much deeper level of issue spotting to help guide our advocacy work and programming.  She also helped us assess our current data gathering tools and provided guidance that will improve our ability to capture accurate and meaningful data moving forward. She is meticulously organized, keeps projects on track, makes complex issues very accessible, and is truly a pleasure to work with. Beth brings a level of joy, curiosity, and thoughtfulness to her work that is rare and very special.”

—Anne Applebaum, The Advocates for Human Rights