2025 Hackathon Showcase: Transforming Data into Social Impact
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Last week’s Actuarial Hackathon Showcase offered a glimpse into the powerful intersection of actuarial expertise and social impact.
Over two months, 40 young actuaries volunteered their time to collaborate with five Australian charities — The Wilderness Society, Justice Connect, Social Ventures Australia, UNICEF Australia and the Community Council for Australia — to transform complex datasets into practical solutions that are already driving real-world change.
From building sustainability scorecards to informing strategic advocacy, the showcase highlighted how actuarial skills can unlock new capacity for organisations to amplify their missions far beyond traditional finance and insurance domains.
As Deborah Smith from Community Council for Australia shared, “This scorecard will not only help charities benchmark their financial health, but it also gives policymakers a clearer picture of sector stability.”
Opening the event, Maathu Ranjan, Vice President of the Actuaries Institute, emphasised the Hackathon's broader significance.
"This year's Hackathon has once again shown us what can happen when we combine our technical expertise with a shared commitment to social impact."
"Whether it be forecasting demand, optimising resources, making sense of messy data or finding out what you need to collect in itself, these are tangible problems for a lot of organisations," Maathu explained, highlighting how actuarial methodology can address challenges outside of traditional applications.
Serving dual purposes, the Hackathon provides charities with expert analytical support while giving actuaries — especially students and early-career professionals — opportunities to apply their skills in new contexts.
"I see this Hackathon as a platform for our younger actuaries, our students, to find their voice, to grow their confidence and to see broader impact that you can create with the skills that you have," Maathu noted.
Maathu Ranjan, Vice President of the Actuaries Institute, opening the 2025 Hackathon.
Revenue modelling for environmental conservation
Working entirely online, the Wilderness Society team tackled complex revenue forecasting challenges. They focused on two critical income streams: regular giving and bequest payments.
The team Chris Li, Dannie Qiao, Erica Soenarjo, Daniel Xu and ZIYI You, applied advanced techniques, including chain ladder methodology and mortality modelling, to develop five-year forecasts. Their analysis projected a gradual decline in regular giving, partially offset by a modest increase in bequest income.
Economic mobility research
Social Ventures Australia tasked a team with identifying leading indicators of economic mobility in Australia, building on international research. The team — Felicia Auryn, Danny Vo, Felicity Ho, Justin McGee Odger, Jack Reardon, and Viswesh Narayan — analysed key indicators and developed an Economic Mobility Profile Builder, enabling individuals to assess their mobility potential based on a range of demographic and socioeconomic factors.
The team’s analysis revealed that education stood out as the strongest leading indicator, alongside employment and household characteristics. Their findings also showed limited upward mobility for individuals in the lowest income brackets.
Streamlining operations for child welfare
UNICEF Australia’s challenge was a practical one: streamlining complex and unreliable budgeting spreadsheets. The actuarial team — Simon Ong, Casper Cheung, Jessie Zhang, James Doolan, Jason Lay and Annabelle Tian, with support from Muiz Murad and Alice Truong — tackled the task by developing a more efficient system to address the burden of frequent manual changes.
They separated data aggregation from forecasting, reduced file size from 18MB to under 10MB and implemented centralised tracking for manual adjustments.
"This is going to essentially cut down the manual work of updating targets and expenses from roughly 30 people spending about an hour per week to 30 people spending about 15 minutes per week," the team reported.
The improvements will significantly reduce the time and effort required across teams and free up capacity for mission-critical work.
Quantifying legal impact
The Justice Crew team coming together virtually to present their findings.
Justice Connect sought to quantify the value of its pro bono legal referral services. Their team, Justice Crew — comprised of Lukas Zdanius, Jasmine Wang, Alexei Srour, Alfred Shepherd and Xu Shi — developed a framework to assess impact across multiple stakeholder groups and provided a robust methodology to estimate the value generated by referrals in employment law.
Although quantifying intangible social outcomes remains complex, the framework offers new tools to help Justice Connect communicate its impact to funders and policymakers.
Sector-wide financial health analysis
The Community Council for Australia team — Aidan Nguyen, Daniel MacCulloch, Han Yu and Charlotte Voon — analysed a decade of data from the national charities regulator to assess the financial resilience of the sector. They developed a Financial Strength Scorecard that evaluated charities across four key pillars: revenue, expenditure, workforce and governance.
The model showed that charities with lower scores had significantly higher failure rates, highlighting the potential of data analytics to support strategic decision-making and sector-wide stability.
Hackathon participants from left to right: Daniel Maccuulloch, Aidan Nguyen and Charlotte Voon - part of the Community Council for Australia team.
The evening concluded with awards celebrating creativity and insight. The Wilderness Society team won “best pun,” Justice Connect earned “best dressed,” and the Community Council for Australia received “best presentation”.
Beyond immediate solutions, the Hackathon demonstrated the profession’s expanding relevance. "The actuarial profession is evolving. Our toolkit is being applied in new and meaningful ways, from climate risks to disability reforms, from financial services to social impact," Maathu observed.
The 2025 Hackathon showed how technical expertise, combined with social purpose, can generate innovative solutions to complex challenges. While the actuarial solutions were impressive, their lasting value lies in the deeper conversations they sparked.
As a representative from Social Ventures Australia summed it up: “The team helped raise new questions and identify key issues. We’ll be using their insights to frame our advocacy and strategic thinking moving forward.”
The 2025 Hackathon Organising Committee.
