Data-informed decision making is a central tenet to collective impact and building the civic infrastructure. Data can serve as the translator when it comes to understanding what is really happening in a community. In the words of one prominent local Strive partner, “People are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.”
One of the roles that a cradle to career partnership plays is promoting the use of community level data. And so the question arises as to what are the roles of a cradle to career partnership in making data available to the public? I think that the answer varies by community depending on the existing organizations and capacities that are currently in place. Some may house and make readily available large amounts of data to be queried by the public and partner organizations, while others may focus only on their core outcome indicators to produce a report card without providing a publicly accessible data portal.
I believe that cradle to career partnerships should play a role in both of these types of efforts. A “report card” is important to be able to organize and report on a set of key outcome indicators that a partnership is organizing around. It is almost more of a communication and storytelling tool, although data being a critical element. The indicators should be relatively few, easy to digest, and something that gets reported on an ongoing basis in order to keep the focus for the partnership. Many partnerships are publishing report cards, and you can find many examples on the Strive Network website.
But there’s only so much data that you can (and would want to) include in a report like this before it becomes too big to digest. So making more and deeper levels of data available in a user friendly way is also important. There’s only so much you can do with high level data before the right questions lead you to dig into to the data to better understand what’s going on and what you can do about it, collectively. So in Cincinnati we also have a tool called Facts Matter that serves as portal for large amounts of data that can be viewed in tables, charts, or on maps - http://www.factsmatter.info. This isn’t led by our cradle to career partnership though. Rather, we partner with a number of local organizations in this effort, and it is owned by these organizations collectively. The partners include United Way of Greater Cincinnati, University of Cincinnati, Greater Cincinnati Foundation, Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, Haile/U.S. Bank Foundation, Northern Kentucky University, Agenda 360, Vision 2015, and the Strive Partnership.
The Strive Network has launched a Community Impact Report Card tool to help sites create and build their own local report card. The Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky partnership’s data from this tool can be seen via the Strive Partnership website. All Hands Raised and the Michigan College Access Network also have examples of this tool in action. And the Facts Matter data portal is built off of another local GIS data solution and is available to other communities as well.
With the growing amounts of data available to communities, it is important to be able to help translate and package the data so that it can be used to inform collective decisions about where to invest resources - time, talent, and treasure.
