Six years ago, a few Two Sigma employees formed an idea to support impactful, yet resource-constrained organizations dedicated to social causes. The idea was based on the legal clinic model of skills-based volunteerism, but instead of doling out legal advice, we would focus on what Two Sigma does best — data science and engineering. A few months later, after winning an employee innovation contest, Two Sigma’s Data Clinic was up and running as a volunteer-led initiative.
A few years later, with six nonprofit partner projects completed, the proof of concept was sufficiently proven. External demand for pro bono data and tech support, as well as the number of employees raising their hands to volunteer, had far exceeded Data Clinic’s ability to scope and onboard projects. To ensure the model could continue to grow and scale, Data Clinic became an official team with full-time dedicated staff.
Backed by enthusiastic volunteers from across Two Sigma, Data Clinic has supported mission-driven work across a wide spectrum of domains, including helping public school teachers understand how to increase access to funding, building anomaly detection models for a water utility to flag water leaks, and researching the rural-urban divide in local jail rates.
As Data Clinic continued to expand, one central tenant held strong: collaboration and partnership are as critical as data science and tech in making our cross-sector model unique and impactful. Two Sigma colleagues bring incredible insights to Data Clinic projects, but it’s our partners whose teams are on the ground who ultimately make a difference. While this is something that informs both our daily work and broader strategic vision, we realized these ideas might not be self-evident to our broader audience.
With this in mind, you may have noticed that Data Clinic recently received a makeover — new logo, new website, new brand. That’s because we wanted to represent the importance of people across our model. People bringing data science and technology knowledge together with content area expertise to collaborate in the service of social good.
We attempted to imbue these ideas into our visual brand, making more explicit how we work, how we think, and what we believe in. Our new logo unites our three guiding principles of people, data science, and collective good. Each is represented by an intersecting circle, with Data Clinic at the center.
And new illustrations bring the brand together, visually demonstrating how people work together to deploy data science and advanced technology to solve problems.
Of course, the real test of whether or not we are living up to our vision comes not from a look, but rather from experience. So we invite you to connect with us, partner with us, and see it in action. If you have an idea for an interesting project, direction, or initiative we should look into, we’d love to hear them.
