Fraser Macdonald, Deputy Director at the Data for Children Collaborative, has been honoured with the prestigious DataIQ Award for 2023 in the Data for Good Champion category. This award recognises his outstanding dedication to utilising data and analytics to improve society, mainly focusing on child-centric challenges.  

Fraser is a true believer in the power that data has to do 'good' in the world. His day job as Deputy Director for the Data for Children Collaborative sees him creating diverse cross-sector transdisciplinary teams and building impactful and agile data projects to answer a broad range of child-focused challenges. Fraser remains steadfast in keeping the Convention on the Rights of the Child at the forefront of all collaborators' minds as data projects transition into the technical build, ensuring that the work is guided by its intended impact.  

Fraser's continued commitment to advancing the concept of data for good is evident in his professional capacity and as the chair of the data advisory group at Young Scot, one of Scotland's largest youth charity.  

Fraser has a rich history in the data field, bringing a wealth of experience from cross-sector data initiatives into the realm of 'Data for Good.' As the former Delivery Director of DataFest, an annual festival of data innovation in Scotland, he sought to facilitate high-quality interactions between diverse sectors, communities, and geographies to support data growth in Scotland and beyond.   

With a growth mindset and a deep appreciation for understanding the positive impacts of data for good initiatives, Fraser has connected with many audiences across different age groups, sectors and geographies to promote data narratives and provide support. Through his actions, Fraser has been instrumental in offering routes for organisations and individuals to contribute to and create data for good projects, resulting in a cultural shift within data science environments to innovate responsibly for human values. Fraser has ensured that his skills in building innovative data solutions with diverse perspectives have been systematised into repeatable methodologies that can be shared with other organisations. This has seen consultancy work with other social impact organisations, including the Jameel Observatory, to support building data-driven solutions around food security in the Horn of Africa.   

Core to Fraser's values is a deep appreciation for understanding the impact of Data for Good initiatives. He has worked tirelessly to create a process to support impact evaluation beyond the academic frame. Learning from a multitude of sectors, from finance and the third sector to academia, and their understanding of impact, Fraser developed a framework which helps to understand where the Data for Children Collaborative's projects have had an impact and a systematic way of measuring that impact. His work has supported other organisations in thinking about how they conceptualise and measure impact. 

Fraser inspires partners, collaborators and beyond to think about creating meaningful collaborations to deliver projects which have a transformative impact on children and young people. For instance, he is in ongoing conversations with many organisations about building a common outcomes framework for children across England.   

The passion and dedication to innovating responsibly are present in everything that Fraser does. He is building a community of people in Scotland who think responsibly and want to support the development of a common language, tools and practices for embedding Responsible Innovation in the way data science engages with the Data for Good work and beyond.   

Building collaborative teams who can work with data in a responsible, sustainable and impactful manner is not easy - but Fraser makes it look just that. 

Finalists:  

Oliver Buchanan, product manager, Sea 

Hannah Lee, data scientist, Zurich Insurance  

Duncan Ross, chief data officer, Times Higher Education  

Collin Smith, core consultant and recruitment lead, The Information Lab 

Data for Children Collaborative is proud to have been nominated for two other categories in 2023 DataIQ Awards. We are pleased for our team and all our collaborators and partners to have taken place amongst the most incredible list of shortlisted candidates. It has been a great privilege, given this year has seen a record number of increasingly strong entries. 

One of the shortlists was for the Best Use of Data for Non-Profit or Non-Commercial Purpose, for which we partnered with The Promise Scotland. Our project with The Promise Scotland united academia, public and private sectors to support Scotland's commitment to children and young people that they will grow up loved, safe and respected. The team works on creating The Promise Data Map – an improvement tool enabling the public sector to understand what data it has and still needs, to recognise and address what matters to children and young people in the ‘care system’. Combining diverse skills across data collection, schematic design, and subject matter knowledge has been vital to building a lasting and engaging tool for creating meaningful social change. 

Our work that supported the publication of UNICEF report on the devastating effects on heatwaves in children titled: ‘The coldest year of the rest of their lives: Protecting children from the escalating impacts of heatwaves’ was shortlisted for the Data for Society Award. For this project, which was a collaboration between UNICEF, experts from the University of Southampton, Edinburgh and Stirling we built a team of multidisciplinary academic researchers to develop plausible scenarios in 2050 across climatic and environmental hazards. The team's analysis and forecasting showed that the hazard that stood out incredibly starkly, particularly in the risk it presented to children, was heatwaves.