Building a data science solution for an NGO when you don’t know what infrastructure it will run on: a case study predicting tutor supply and demand mismatch

The Brilliant Club supports less advantaged students to access and succeed in the UK’s most competitive universities. They do this by mobilising the PhD community to support students in schools via their courses and tutoring programme. A challenge they face is being able to anticipate the tutor supply they need to meet the increasing demands of their programmes as they expand nationally. A team of six DataKind UK volunteers worked with The Brilliant Club to develop a way to forecast and visualise the mismatch between tutor supply and demand across the UK. This is a talk about how we collaboratively explored their data and built a valuable, new tool for them and, crucially, how we did so in a flexible, scalable way that provides them with immediate value but also will fit into their future use of digital and cloud-based tools.