Is your community striving to address complex social issues such as ending homelessness, solving the child care crisis, or strengthening the workforce? These issues are bigger than what one entity can accomplish alone. In the past few years, we have seen communities come together to address key social challenges in their communities. We have seen community members, nonprofit organizations, donors, and foundations all approach these challenges from various angles.
Understanding Community Need
One of the first steps in addressing a community social issue is to create a “baseline understanding” of the current situation related to the social issue. This is where pulling data from key indicators provides that baseline understanding of the focus areas. These key indicators allow us to measure progress toward achieving important community goals. We find that when communities work toward clearly aligned goals, they result in a collective effort to drive change.
The Role of Community Indicators
Whether working to create a community indicators dashboard, build a coalition, or establish a collective impact framework, community indicators allow us to facilitate collaborative action toward shared goals. Community indicators help us measure progress and identify areas in our communities that need attention. In addition, these indicators can guide decision-making, inform collaboration, and maximize impact.
We have developed community indicator dashboards for communities across the United States. We collaborated with community leaders to create dashboards for a variety of audiences.
In Putnam County, Indiana, we worked with the Putnam County Community Foundation to create, design, and launch a community indicator dashboard composed of five key focus areas: Mental Health, Substance Use and Addiction, Early Childhood Education, Workforce Development, and Housing. Their dashboard combines 50 community indicators from over 10 data sources. The community foundation saw the dashboard as an opportunity to support its nonprofit grantees and community by providing a compilation of data to make data-informed decisions.
In Collier County, Florida, we worked with the Collier Community Foundation to develop a community indicators dashboard to inform their grantmaking, tell the story of their community’s needs and opportunities, and
create an accessible tool for their community partners. Through the foundation’s prior work, they identified five community indicator topics: Housing, Health, Environment, Education, and Economic Opportunity. The Collier County community indicators dashboard is a comprehensive collection of 90 community indicators from over 20 data sources
In Paterson, New Jersey, we worked with Montclair State University and the collective impact group, Paterson One Square Mile, to create a strategic housing action plan to strengthen the future of Paterson, NJ. We developed a community indicators dashboard to monitor progress toward their five housing goals: Expand Housing Affordability, Increase Supply and Stability, Improve Housing Quality, Create Housing and Safe Neighborhoods, and Build Assets and Wealth.
Benefits of Community Indicators
There are many benefits for communities to develop and share a community indicators dashboard. We highlighted a few benefits below.
- Support Data-Informed Decision-Making: Help communities establish clear indicators to ensure a collective understanding of key issues among organizations, donors, and community members.
- Highlight Community Need: Help communities identify strengths and opportunities for improvements in their communities to focus their efforts.
- Visualize Community Well-Being: Help communities and partners “see” the current state of key indicators in their community with supporting context information and utilize visual tools to make the data more dynamic and interactive.
- Communicate Impact: Help communities communicate their impact and demonstrate how needs are being met over time by measuring their progress toward reaching key indicators.
- Facilitate Collaboration: Provide communities with the data for partners to collectively work together to improve impact.
When communities work together on collective key indicators, it allows them to move the needle on important social issues and drive measurable progress toward their targeted focus areas. If you are interested in learning more about our dashboard solutions, click here or contact a team member for a free discovery meeting.
