Roanoke Council of Community Services and a new online platform that brings life to community indicators through data presentation

Background

The Roanoke Council of Community Services was set up in 1960 to aid the planning of community services in Roanoke Valley. Its vision is to establish a community where organizations are able to work collaboratively to increase social wealth, provide greater access to resources, reduce redundancy and focus on human potential as the drivers for economic development and individual well-being. The Council has three areas of activity. First it acts as the central hub for identifying community needs and developing solutions to address these needs. Second it serves as a central clearinghouse, or gateway, connecting individuals in the community to programmes that are best suited to address their needs and third the Council serves as a launching pad for developing new programmes to meet community needs.

We spoke to Dan Meranda, Vice President of Planning & Consultation at the Council about data visualization and how it is being used to provide community organizations with timely insight about the local community. Dan explains that the Council put a lot of effort into establishing which indicators could be used to develop a picture of trends over time.

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IA Tools Enhance JCCI’s Data Analysis Capacities

Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI) began using Instant Atlas to display its Quality of Life Progress Report community indicators in September of 2009. For the first 18 months, we used the Single Map Template to show approximately 125 indicators, many of them stretching back over 25 years, in a way that was revolutionary for our community.  People throughout our community, from policy-makers to grant writers to community advocates, appreciated the ease and clarity with which they could get the data they needed.  On our part, we appreciated the freedom from the constraints of the printed report, allowing us to update information as soon as it was released (often beating the local newspaper to the publication of new data.)

Beginning last month, we decided to see how our community would react to seeing some of the other tools Instant Atlas has to offer. When we used the Double Map Template and began playing with the scatterplot tools, we started to see interesting (and sometimes unexpected) correlations that we could verify over time. In fact, the use of this template helped provide a definitive answer if one of our indicators truly was still a significant and useful measure today. (It was, much more than anticipated.)

If the scatterplot tool, allowing comparisons between two indicators, revealed such interesting information, we wondered what the Bubble Plot Template might show? Once we began examining relationships among four indicators at the same time, we began to see targeted opportunities for additional research and policy direction. For example, when examining high school graduation rates, we found school districts that were overperforming in relation to the social and economic conditions within the district, and other districts that were underperforming – including districts with a reputation for excellence.  Suddenly, we were able to bring together useful information in a compelling visual display with the ability to reshape community conversations around priorities and policies – and the data is available for anyone in our community to check for themselves.

You can see how we’re using Instant Atlas at http://www.jcci.org.

Jacksonville Community Council Inc. | ‘How Jacksonsville County is using community indicators to target resources and reduce inequalities’

“InstantAtlas maps help our community users see where resources need to be targeted to help reduce inequalities”.

Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI) was created in 1975 and its mission is to improve the quality of life and build a better community for people living in Northeast Florida and beyond. The organization is sometimes referred to as Jacksonville’s “citizen think tank”.

JCCI has been publishing annual community indicators for 25 years. These indicators help a wide range of citizens understand trends in areas such as population growth, education, work-related statistics, healthcare and housing.

Ben Warner is JCCI’s Deputy Director and he emphasizes the importance of making large amounts of data available in a timely and easy-to-understand way. “We first started out publishing the data in printed form but recognised that, for the data to be as useful as possible for as many audiences as we had, we needed a platform that too would allow us to have greater control over the way the data could be published and accessed,” he says.

JCCI began to investigate different software packages that would allow it to present the data in such a way. However, concerns were quickly raised.  “We were most concerned that we would end up with a proprietary database product and would not even own the data. We wanted something that our community would find easy to use with very few technical terms involved in manipulating the data. Above all we wanted something that we could have up and running quickly.”

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