Data Friends Showcase
The short version: Started a voluntary monthly demo series to help one team know what the other was doing. Four years
later, nearly 100 people from across a 900-person organization show up every month — including founders and C-suite —
entirely through word of mouth.
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How It Started
When I joined Best Friends, the organization had just consolidated two teams — business intelligence and analytics —
into one. Leaders had turned over. People on my team didn't know what their colleagues were working on. And the most
data-engaged people throughout the organization didn't know what the data team could do for them. There was no formal
request process, so help happened through relationships: you asked whoever you happened to know.
When I'd meet with people across the org and describe what we could do, the reaction was always the same: surprise.
They didn't know anyone could help them with that.
I wanted to fix that — not with a communication strategy or a formal program, but with something simple. Two short
project demos. Q&A. Monthly. That's it.
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What It Became
The first session had fewer than 30 people. The engagement was immediate — questions, ideas, people suddenly
understanding the scope of what was possible with data. Word spread.
We kept it going. We started inviting citizen data scientists from across the organization to share their own work
alongside our team's projects. Fundraising and grants teams started asking to join so they could understand what was
fundable. Members of the C-suite started attending regularly. Founders show up every month.
Nearly 100 people now attend each month — voluntarily, out of a 900-person organization, with no formal promotion
beyond word of mouth and the occasional mention in an all-hands meeting. We host 13 sessions per year. Recordings live
in SharePoint and became part of onboarding for anyone joining the data team.
When the AI program launched and the innovation team wanted to start a separate "AI Friends" series, I made the case
to combine them. The audiences were overlapping, the format was the same, and two voluntary monthly meetings covering
similar ground would compete with each other unnecessarily. We started surfacing AI projects from across the
organization alongside data work, and transitioned to Zoom to manage an invite list that had grown past 200 people.
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The Data Literacy Trivia
About a year and a half ago we added something small at the top of each session: one data literacy question. A
business rule, a calculation, a fact about our data that most people get wrong or ask about frequently. Sometimes it's
tied to something new — a product launch, a definition change, an updated methodology.
The point isn't to quiz people. It's to demonstrate that nobody knows everything, and that there's always something
worth learning about how our data actually works. In a room of a hundred people, watching senior leaders realize they
don't know the answer to a question about the data they use every day — that's a culture moment. It normalizes not
knowing and makes learning feel like part of the job.
