How Well Does Your Community Use Data?
By Leah Hendey
A publication of the Local Data for Equitable Recovery Resource Hub
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the City of Minneapolis, local funders, and community groups knew they could turn to the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) at the University of Minnesota for data and analysis. CURA quickly estimated the square footage available if churches were used for overflow hospital beds or shelters and the number of residents most likely to face unemployment. They also helped a neighborhood organization map and track block clubs to ensure every block had someone who could communicate about available resources.
This pandemic has highlighted the necessity of widespread capacity to understand and use data to improve outcomes and meet people’s and organizations’ immediate needs. Governments need data to decide how to reopen communities. Nonprofits use data to target services. And people weigh their risk tolerance for activities against high positivity rates. But in communities across the US, the resources, skills, and practices needed for all these applications of data are not well understood and not widely held by a diverse set of organizations and people. When communities use data well, all community members and those serving them can work together not only to respond to crises but also to improve lives and address inequities.
A community with data capacity (PDF) is one where people can access and use data to inform efforts to understand and improve outcomes where they live. To achieve this, communities need both the resources to enable data capacity and the skills and practices to support individuals, organizations, and the community collectively. Every community can improve its effective data use in advocacy, planning, policymaking, and program implementation, though the activities and investments will vary depending on the community and its institutions. Community leaders — in philanthropy, government, the nonprofit sector, academia, and neighborhoods — should consider how they can contribute to strengthening data capacity where they live and work.
Establish building blocks
Enabling resources: Access to data and access to help with data
These two resource categories are necessary for building community data capacity. The first, access to data, may seem obvious, but we define access more broadly. For example, it includes not only raw data available in open data portals but also data shared in accessible formats like infographics, neighborhood profiles, and handouts for audiences with different levels of comfort using data. The second, access to help in using data, is also critical to ensuring widespread capacity. Some organizations, like members of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, are providing technical assistance to local stakeholders through trainings, one-on-one coaching, and guides to using data that help people determine what data are needed and how to apply them.
Expand people’s skills and knowledge
Individual capacity elements: Confidence with data, ethical conduct, technical skills, subject matter expertise, and communication skills
Investments in organizations that provide help with data, data training, and curricula are needed to build individuals’ skills and practices. All people should feel confident that they can interpret data and statistics and ask questions about the data’s origins, usefulness, and applications. But other skills, such as technical skills, can and should be leveraged across a community, taking advantage of people’s and organizations’ strengths and assets. For example, staff at the Institute for Urban Policy Research at the University of Texas at Dallas have the training and technical skills to analyze administrative records. They partnered with the Texas Tenants’ Union to explore if a local policy on grace periods before an eviction could keep tenants in their homes. Subject matter expertise is needed in the community to identify data sources, develop indicators, and understand the data’s limitations and connections to policy and practice. This may take the form of professional expertise, like Air Alliance Houston staff’s knowledge of environmental justice and transportation policy, or accounts of residents’ lived experience during the pandemic being collected by Cook County Family Connection.
Improve planning and operations with data
Organizational capacity elements: Culture of curiosity, data investments, data governance, routine data use, and integration of data across roles
Local organizations and agencies also need to invest in their teams and management processes to increase their capacity to use data. Catalyst Miami is investing in collecting information on small businesses to inform their own programming and help the City of North Miami direct relief funds. Urban Harvest worked with the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University to build a decision support tool to routinize data use in decisionmaking on need for their mobile market program in Houston neighborhoods. This data tool allows Urban Harvest staff to coordinate and use data in multiple roles.
Join together to spread capacity
Collective elements: Learning communities, resource investment, collective planning, and data sharing
Collective data capacity elements are community-wide practices that are more than the sum of the individual and organizational capacities described above. These practices support data use across the whole community, build widespread capacity across people and organizations, and strengthen connections among different groups. Communities should work together so organizations can take advantage of their perspectives, data capacities, and networks. CTData Collaborative has developed a community of practice that is exploring how to promote and adopt equitable data practices among Hartford-area nonprofits. In South Bend, Indiana, 22 food pantries were invited to share data weekly about availability of different food groups to a collective dashboard. Funders in the Emergency Food Initiative use the dashboard to determine and track need and inform their investment strategies. Innovate Memphis began the Civic Data Forum to convene local stakeholders in a collective planning effort to build a culture of data sharing and celebrate open data and efforts to improve data collection and publishing.
Equip your community for progress
Every community can build and strengthen their enabling resources and elements of capacity at these different levels. If data capacity is widespread and equitably held, communities may collect new data, different insights may result from missing perspectives, and innovative ideas can emerge. Building community data capacity is necessary to enabling communities to equitably respond to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and to make progress on other ambitious goals, like reducing persistent poverty and advancing economic mobility.
