Interested in joining FCP’s Starter Dashboard Cohort?
Applications are now open
Read more to learn about the project and how you can join the cohort
Project Background
Community dashboards are critical infrastructure for community coalitions working locally to shift systems that influence opportunities for thriving. They provide a framework for aligning on collective goals and outcomes, developing aligned strategies and assessing ongoing impact. Despite this value, dashboards are expensive to develop and sustain in the long term. They require significant technical expertise as well as intentional community engagement to ensure support and adoption. These constraints form a barrier to resource strapped organizations with limited technical expertise and hamper the potential impact of dashboards’ coalition building and public advocacy.
A year ago, Finding Common Purpose and North Arrow kicked off the Starter Dashboard Pilot, a project aimed at addressing this exact issue.
Built on learnings from the starter dashboard pilot, Finding Common Purpose and North Arrow have developed an offering that provides quick, affordable access to a simple streamlined community dashboard while embedding opportunities and funding for community engagement. This standardized offering is able to support a wide range of organizational types allowing them to work with local partners to track key community outcomes, visually share progress, and engage residents and stakeholders around shared goals.
Project Overview
This September, we are opening the Starter Dashboard Project to a new cohort of 4-6 organizations.
We will work with them for 12-15 weeks to develop community dashboards and facilitate community engagement to inform dashboard development and adoption.
These dashboards will utilize publicly accessible federal and regional data sources to illuminate the population outcomes that matter to them, embed aligned narratives on the implications for their communities and provide a platform for engaging with residents and local partners.
This project will include funding for the technical assistance from FCP’s technical partner, North Arrow, the capacity commitment and intentional community engagement.
Timeline: The Starter Dashboard Project will run from October 2026 to February 2027. Please NOTE that this is an estimate and is subject to delays from the holiday season.
Deliverables: By the end of the project, each organization in the cohort will have received:
- A starter community dashboard (led by North Arrow)
- Facilitated support to engage with key community stakeholders during the build and adoption phase (with support from FCP)
- Learning sessions in which they engage with leaders and data experts from other place-based partnerships who are advancing innovative and impactful approaches to the 6 effective practices
- Depending on clear evidence of alignment between FCP and the participant org, and commitment to an outcomes approach, an additional 2 years of partnership and funding to ensure continuity and implementation of the 6 effective practices.
- NOTE: Technical support and data updates are built into the service for at least a year
Applicant Eligibility
Finding Common Purpose primarily partners with place-based initiatives: community-driven initiatives convening a cross-section of local stakeholders—residents, programmatic partners, local leadership and policy makers— to address complex social and economic issues within their geographic areas that impact the ability of working Americans to thrive. We primarily focus on PBIs working across our 7 key domains of thriving:
- Financial resilience (wages & savings)
- Housing
- Childcare
- Education
- Healthcare
- Mentalhealth
The starter dashboard is best suited to organizations who are:
- Working within a cross-section of community partners to improve community wellbeing on one or more of FCP’s 7 domains of thriving
- Interested in setting (or already have) clear North Star goals and identifying outcomes that can serve as key indicators of movement towards/away from those goals
- At a stage in organizational development and collaborative maturity where a community dashboard is strategically valuable and appropriate
- Able to identify clear use-cases for the community dashboard that align with FCP’s 6 effective practices
How to Apply
To join the Starter Dashboard Project, click here to apply.
To learn more, read the article on our first starter dashboard cohort and attend the webinar on the 15th of July, where we will overview the project and answer questions on the application process. Click here to register.
Applications will be reviewed and interviews held on a rolling basis beginning on the 15th of July.
Applications will close on the 15th of August.
If you have not heard back from our team within 3 weeks of submission, please reach out to hephzibah@findingcommonpurpose.org.
