Is your community working to address complex social issues, such as ending homelessness, resolving the childcare crisis, or strengthening the workforce? These challenges require a collective effort; no single entity can tackle them alone. By utilizing community indicators, we can gain a deeper understanding of the root causes of these issues and monitor progress over time. In recent years, communities have come together to address key social challenges, leveraging data-driven insights to drive meaningful change. Community members, nonprofit organizations, donors, and foundations have all played a role in addressing these challenges from various angles, utilizing community indicators to inform strategies and measure their impact.
Understanding Community Need
One of the first steps in addressing a community social issue is to develop a “baseline understanding” of the current situation. This is where pulling data from key indicators provides that baseline understanding of the focus areas. These key indicators help us measure progress toward essential community goals. We find that when communities work toward clearly aligned goals, they drive a collective effort to 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. Additionally, these indicators can guide decision-making, inform collaboration, and maximize the impact.
We have developed community indicator dashboards for communities across the United States. We collaborated with community leaders to create dashboards tailored for various audiences.
In Putnam County, Indiana, we collaborated with the Putnam County Community Foundation to develop, design, and launch a community indicator dashboard encompassing 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 viewed the dashboard as an opportunity to support its nonprofit grantees and the community by providing a compilation of data to inform data-driven 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 develop a strategic housing action plan to strengthen Paterson’s future. 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 in developing and sharing 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 Needs: Help communities identify their strengths and opportunities for improvement to focus their efforts.
- Visualize Community Well-being: Help communities and partners “see” the current state of key indicators in their Community, along with supporting context, and use 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 to enable partners to work together collectively and improve their impact.
When communities collaborate on key collective indicators, they can make meaningful progress 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 to schedule a complimentary discovery meeting.
