Integrating R to Elevate our Practice
As an evaluation and learning organization, we constantly assess our methods and practices to understand how we can optimize our engagement with clients. This practice demonstrates our core values of delivering excellence through agility in our approach and inquiry into current trends in the field.
Our best practice teams (BPTs) at OMNI lead our efforts in knowledge development, management, dissemination, and serve as subject matter experts. These functional teams bring together staff from across divisions and cultivate deep expertise in specific methods or practices. This year, our Quantitative BPT is leading an organization-wide initiative to train our team and deploy R as our primary tool for analysis, reporting, and visualization at OMNI.
R, an open-source programming language and statistical software, offers powerful and flexible options for working with data and allows us to combine the roles of several software programs into one. We can streamline our process from data cleaning to reporting, including visualization, and analysis. Over the last five years, there has been a swell of uptake across the social sector and beyond, and we're excited to join organizations ranging from the BBC, to FiveThirtyEight, and the Urban Institute in realizing the benefits that R can offer to our work and clients.
At the end of October, 14 OMNI staff participated in a training by David Keyes, from R for the Rest of Us, about the fundamentals of working in R Studio and using tidyverse for data wrangling, analysis, and visualization. Since completing the training, our team is incorporating R into several projects to explore how it can transform our work across divisions. We’re already using it to directly pull US Census data, analyze and visualize quantitative data, connect directly with survey platforms, and streamline site-level reporting. Most importantly for our work, using R will streamline the entire process of working with data, allowing us more flexibility in our analysis and reporting for clients through a more scalable platform.
We love learning new methods and tools to maximize our content and research expertise for clients. We will check in through our blog over the coming months with examples of the powerful ways we are putting R to work.