Our Principles

Statistics for Sustainable Development > Our Principles

Our key values are summarised in our Principles Document, which highlights how we wish to operate. These values guide our conduct as a not-for-profit social enterprise, committed to supporting sustainable development, and are the basis for our efforts towards achieving our goal of ‘promoting better use of statistical methods for decision-making to benefit society and the environment’.

Read the full document

We are a Not-For-Profit

For Stats4SD to be a ‘not-for-profit’, we decided from the start to legally restrict how any surpluses made by the organisation would be used.

In practice, this means that there are no owners of the company, and no one can make personal financial gains from the work of the organisation.

Responsible Data Handling

For Stats4SD, responsible data management is all about treating the data that we collect with respect, and managing the rights of respondents – the people from whom we collect our data from. We scrutinise the entire project lifecycle to check that we are handling data responsibly and as carefully as we can be. Some of these steps include:

  1. Making a Plan: clearly defining the purpose of the project and the data we’ll be collecting.
  2. Conducting a Risk Assessment: we assess the risks and take actions with regards to data security and confidentiality, and plan this into each project.
  3. Training Enumerators: if we use enumerators, we train them ourselves to uphold high standards of data collection and for the consent process to be fully understood.
  4. Data Access, Storage and Sharing: we ensure steps are taken to safely and securely store, access and share our data, e.g. through the use of encrypted files and passwords.
  5. Retaining and Disposing of Data: data is only kept if necessary, otherwise we ensure that it is safely deleted and disposed of.

Giving Back

As a result of making small surpluses in our first 2 years of operation, Stats4SD was able to make donations to good causes nominated by our staff. These donations are made to people or organisations that are connected in some way with sustainable development, data and information or our local communities. In 2018, £16,500 were donated, while an additional £3,500 allocated, but not yet disbursed.

In September 2018, Stats4SD celebrated its two-year anniversary of being in the Reading office, and followed this up with a tree-planting excursion with the Woodland Trust in Epsom. We had a great day out (in pouring rain and strong wind, no less!) and it felt like a lovely way to commemorate our two-year anniversary.