Effective Practice #6: Building Data Infrastructure and Capacity

Central to FCP’s mission is the belief that publicly accessible and actionable outcomes data  is key to strengthening the cross-sector collaborations that ensure that working Americans can thrive in ways that matter to them. The infrastructure and practices that support communities in identifying collective goals and tracking progress are essential to catalyzing action and driving the systemic shifts needed to improve lived experience across the country. 

Within this context, community dashboards are an underutilized strategic tool that can accelerate and sustain common purpose and collaboration across the field of place-based work. If deployed well, they can act as vehicles for ensuring public access and commitment to outcomes that advance collectively-held communal goals. In a study of over 572 place-based partnerships,  we identified six effective practices that when implemented together can support the success and sustainability of community dashboards. On a broader scale, these practices are valuable for ensuring the success of other modes of public outcomes sharing. 

Overview

In this brief, we explore how place-based partnerships (PBPs) can develop strategic data infrastructures that ensure that community dashboards are  a sustainable and impactful tool in building public awareness, support, and accountability towards outcomes that reflect shared visions for measurable and meaningful progress. We researched existing field leaders to develop the list of best practices, challenges, and insights that constitutes this brief.

Section 1: Practices to Ensure Strong, Accurate, and Reliable Data Infrastructure

In this section, we will dive into the key actions and considerations an organization should adopt when developing a strong and influential data collection, analysis, and sharing. These practices ensure accuracy and reliability to the data as it reflects progress toward an organization’s North Star goal and lived experiences of a community. 

Develop a Holistic, Cross-Sectoral Understanding of the Core Issue

Developing a holistic understanding of the factors influencing outcomes in the issue area(s) an organization works in is vital to ensure the work is effective and unsiloed. 

Doing so outlines:

A comprehensive regional landscape analysis forms the foundation for all other aspects of this work and is supportive of the development of a logical theory of change, a realistic and data-informed North-Star goal, measurable outcomes, and effective partnerships that can be leveraged to improve programming, policy and evaluation. 

Without a comprehensive understanding of the current baseline, the potential impact of any partnerships or interventions are compromised, with gains in one milestone being lost due to others that have been under-resourced or poorly understood. Depending on the issue area, PBP’s can often rely on network conveners such as StriveTogether who have developed trusted frameworks such as their cradle-to-career framework that can be leaned on to understand standard factors that impact specific issue areas. However, PBP’s must be careful to interpret and use these in the unique context of their communities, seeing such outlines as tools for reference, not a universal application that can be used for every community’s needs and goals. While this step has been framed as an initial course of action  it must be returned to as local landscapes shift, partners evolve, and outcomes progress or regress. 

Identify and Choose Reliable Indicators

Community dashboards have the capacity to be multipurpose: they allow us to track progress with transparency while also identifying the indicators and variables (activities, programs, inputs) that directly impact the core outcomes. Alongside strong partnerships and intentional community engagement, indicators help to progress key audiences along the commitment continuum, moving them from awareness of key outcomes to understanding of how those outcomes are shaped.

Identifying  (and measuring when possible) reliable and actionable indicators supports partners and residents in understanding how their programs, activities and behaviors impact progress toward a community’s North-Star goal. More importantly, indicators are helpful for maintaining long-term focus and commitment. Top line outcomes don’t typically change quickly as the impact of programs, interventions and policies take a while to surface. Indicators however, often show progress or regression before the top line outcome does, helping to counter or alleviate notions of despair or hopelessness that may prevent widespread acceptance or adoption of a community dashboard. In other words, they function in the interim as predictive signals that help us understand what’s working and why.  These indicators represent actionable measures that can inform strategies, be reported on regularly and support trust and credibility building. 

Develop a Framework for Data Collection and Sharing

Data infrastructure in place-based partnerships relies heavily on cross-sector collaboration and data sharing, but it is of utmost importance to protect the data your organization is stewarding to maintain trust with your community. Maintaining strong data security is paramount in order for your organization to rely on the data you collect as a way to show unique mission strategy, progress, and showcase the story of a community when using this data for credibility and publicity purposes. 

This framework should:

Develop Strong and Influential Data Sets 

Building a dashboard through an iterative development process- the process of building out the dashboard, testing data collection methods, and refining models on an ongoing basis and occurring in multiple cycles rather than delivering a final product all at once- will help to ensure a dashboard that is accurate and reflective of lived experiences.  It is helpful to engage with stakeholders and community members throughout the process to provide feedback that will help to better refine metrics and assist with the ongoing refinement of the process. 

Here are some things to consider when developing data sets:

“People love dashboards, especially funders, those with power higher up the chain. But you can disconnect yourself from the people the dashboard is supposed to help. If you don’t go back and collect street data – quantitative data helps shine a light, then you have to get the real work done of understanding lived experience – the factor analysis that needs to happen. Dashboards are just one tool, one piece- the more we lift that up on its own with nothing else, the more we get away from actually tackling problems.”

Michael Looft Marin Promise Partnership

Identify Data Criteria

To develop infrastructure that is clear and sustainable, an organization must identify the key criteria datasets must meet to be used in the dashboard. These criteria vary based on the outcomes the PBP is hoping to achieve. However, these criteria should ensure that the data is:

Designate the Data Team

Designating a member or members of an organization to be responsible for ongoing management of infrastructure is essential in order for consistency, accuracy, and promotion of an organization’s work. To ensure strategic alignment on organizational values, goals, and outcomes, the data team should have input in developing the data collection strategy, sharing, visualization, ongoing dashboard maintenance and updates, and use of data in communicating the organization’s progress toward North Star outcomes to stakeholders.

Additionally, this team plays a fundamental role in using the dashboard data to tell the story of their community, showing partners and stakeholders how the work being done is or is not progressing outcomes within a community. Building relationships with members of the community, or having community members and or ambassadors directly involved in the process is vital to embedding community feedback in the data collection process. If the data is not connected with the lived experience of a community, this team must be proactive in ensuring that any adjustments reflect correct metrics and are consistently tracked. 

Build in Regular and Thorough Training of Data Team

To maintain alignment, clarity, efficiency and awareness of the changing data landscape, provide continuous training to data staff. This gives the staff an opportunity to refine their practice, engage with their work and data in a more thought-provoking way, identify gaps in the work, and improve streamlined tracking processes. This ensures that staff are prepared for the unprecedented and unpredictable outcomes of data collection that inevitably arise and challenge the work being done, as well as adapt efficiently to the fast paced and ever changing landscape of data collection. 

Ensure Accuracy

To ensure accurate data collection, organizations need to continuously assess their data. This practice ensures the data remains relevant for measuring progress toward their desired outcomes. When contexts shift, as they so often do, those tracking and working with the data will be able to shift methods as needed. Moreover, the team members responsible for showcasing the data to partners and communities will be able to hear and translate feedback to understand if the data is resonating with the community or not

Section 2: Data Use Beyond the Dashboard

Data is essential for tracking progress toward short and long-term outcomes, but it is also essential for building trusting relationships, storytelling, and eventually motivating meaningful policy decisions. Without grounded, clear, accurate data, a place-based initiative will struggle to continue to allocate the necessary support, funding, and continue its mission toward thriving communities. 

Data Infrastructure and Building Trusting Relationships

Building capacity for soft infrastructure- or building trust, relationships, and shared accountability-is as important as the hard product of a community dashboard. Without shared trust among stakeholders, a place–based initiative may struggle to gain the access to data they need to build out a dashboard, communicate the needs or findings of their initiatives, and move the needle towards achieving better outcomes for their communities. 

Intentionally engaging the people and groups who will be using the data and those who have influence over outcomes when designing the dashboard is essential. Consistent and open communication throughout the dashboard development process builds trust in the data and increases the capacity for stakeholder collaboration. Shared decision making is critical to the data tracking process because it addresses concerns regarding bias, unseen gaps in data,  and ultimately builds broader buy-in to accelerate data usage in shared decision making. To ensure a dashboard is understandable and thus actionable for those beyond high level stakeholders, clarity and simplicity are paramount when presenting data. 

Ensure Accessibility and Community Buy-In

Publicly accessible community dashboard data serves to empower communities to enact the change they wish to see. Data is power. By providing access to this data, it enables them to track their progress and ultimately share their journey and argue for what they need. Creating open and transparent relationships with partners and community members will ensure that stakeholders have a connection to the data and can understand it. 

There are different levels of explanation required when showcasing data. When sharing data with a community, it can take many forms and sometimes requires out-of-the-box thinking and strategy to do so. 

Some examples of how organizations have done this include:

Making sure data is accessible and understood by a wide audience enables an organization to continuously maintain and improve it. Additionally, ensuring accessibility means that the data shows as clear a picture of the work being done as possible. Too many data points and those unfamiliar with understanding and reading data may become overwhelmed. Too few data points and an organization may not be able to support the initiative in the long term through stakeholder buy-in. 

Additionally, the language used to describe the data is incredibly important to refrain from sharing misinformation or for the data to be misconstrued or misinterpreted.  Historically, data has been used to harm certain communities due to systemically implanted biases and prejudices and ultimately causing more harm to these communities than good. Therefore, participatory models that include feedback throughout build out of an organization’s infrastructure limits the potential for the outcome to cause unprecedented harm, and instills a sense of alignment and accountability within an organization and the  community it works within. This hits on one of the reasons why place-based work is so important—it is reshaping the narrative of how data is conducted from being an institutionally run to community run, empowering communities who have been historically ignored or disenfranchised to use the data to enact change they wish to see. 

Make the Data Readily Actionable by Building an Appetite for the Data

Building soft infrastructure with partners helps to increase the appetite for data, which ensures there is regional support for the data in the future and increasing likelihood for dashboard persistence. Furthermore, cultivating an interest in data equips organizations to pivot more effectively toward action-oriented data usage, facilitating both strategic execution and the support of policy choices grounded in data-backed evidence.

Data is key to supporting actions made by community mobilization and or policy changes because it offers a clear and concise way to show how well (or unwell) a community is doing in making progress toward their North Star outcomes. This can be done strategically by inputting data points when meeting with stakeholders to convey progress or gaps. Consistent showcasing of data in a subtle way is an effective strategy to build an appetite for data. This “readiness building” allows for a more swift transition when the data is made publicly accessible by using it to inform policy decisions.

Using Data for Storytelling

Data is an art as well as a science. Data is essential in grounding the stories of communities in tangible, logical metrics to help community’s stories be felt more deeply and concretely. 

Quantitative data grounds a story home, showcasing the hard facts of a community’s overall well being and prosperity. Qualitative data on the other hand paints a more intimate and relatable picture of a community’s experience.  Rachel Kramer, Director of Data Strategy and Impact for Chattanooga 2.0 honed in on the importance of story telling when sharing data. “As someone who spends a lot of time with numbers, I’m comfortable with them-  but if we just throw out numbers, people glaze over, it doesn’t hold weight. Being able to tell the story—adding contributing indicators is important and helps with this— frames what’s happening in the county beyond just a literacy proficiency rate.” 

It is a way to amplify the experiences of communities whose voices are otherwise dismissed or lost. Qualitative data is beginning to be used more widely in the space of place-based work, and how to best collect and showcase this data is an ongoing process. As Emma Smales, Senior Director of Data and Statewide Strategy of L2E Dayton states, “Data has helped us talk about our work outside of traditional educational spaces – because we really believe that you need to look at the entire student, whole family to have positive student outcomes. People get weird if you go outside the space they know you for. Data helps us stay rooted in why we’re doing this, where else we need to be.”

Closing

This practice brief is meant to serve as an outline for place-based initiatives looking to gain a better understanding of how to build and sustain capacity for data infrastructure that will support their initiative long-term. This practice brief is reflective of collective experiences held by the place-based partners interviewed by Finding Common Purpose-not a comprehensive guide. Place-based initiative work is a growing field, relying on ever changing infrastructure and contextual factors which require flexibility and creativity to adapt to. Therefore, this brief is a stepping stone toward knowledge sharing and aligning place-based initiatives around common considerations when building data infrastructure and capacity.

At FCP, we believe that this investment is a critical component in driving a community-led vision for what it means to thrive. For more information on our approach, or for questions about how to learn more, please complete the contact form at LINK.

Explore More Briefs from FCP

Effective Practice #1: Theory of Change

This resource focuses on using community dashboards to make the North Star and Theory of Change visible and actionable, while communicating progress on meaningful, measurable, and regularly updated population-level outcomes.

Effective Practice #2: Media Engagement

This best practices focuses on how place-based partnerships can use community dashboards as a springboard for leveraging media and storytelling to build public awareness, support, and accountability to help achieve their shared vision.

Effective Practice #3: Community Engagement

This best practice focuses on how place-based partnerships can embed community engagement throughout the life cycle of their dashboards – from design to use to long-term sustainability.