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Sustaining Community Dashboards in Place Based Partnerships

Community dashboards are one of the most effective tools a place-based initiative can use. But right now, too many are disappearing. Why? And what can we do to change this?

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Community dashboards are one of the most effective tools a place-based initiative can use. When they work right, community dashboards communicate a theory of change, track progress toward a North Star goal, and create the kind of public accountability that builds community trust over time.

In 2022, Finding Common Purpose created a database of 572 place-based partnerships across the United States. Of those, only 42% were using any form of public reporting, and just 14% — 80 organizations — had a community dashboard. That number was already low —and it just got lower. In July 2025, we revisited all 80 sites, and we found nearly half of those community dashboards are gone. Four of the organizations no longer exist at all, and only 41 of the dashboards are still active and regularly updated.

In Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Jill Gomez of the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet describes how “digestible data helps partners understand how their role contributes to their collective goals, which promotes buy-in and trust.” In Chattanooga, Tennessee, local policymakers rely on Chattanooga 2.0’s dashboard to inform decisions and drive lasting change.

But dashboards that disappear can’t do any of that. And right now, too many are disappearing.

Why?

For one, they depend on people and resources. And often the people leave, and the resources don’t last. Maintaining a dashboard requires ongoing funding, data expertise, and institutional commitment. When any of those disappear — a grant ends, a staff member leaves, priorities shift — the dashboard often goes with them.

The fix isn’t complicated, but it requires intention: codify data practices so they aren’t locked in one person’s head, build maintenance into budget lines from the start, and treat the dashboard as infrastructure, not a deliverable. Oftentimes, organizations have limited internal capacity to withstand the continuous demands of dashboard maintenance. Therefore, building more flexible and automated practices for data management is crucial for dashboard longevity. Not only will this relieve pressure on the people behind the data, but it can help to expand the data’s reach, offering insights into more than one issue area and ultimately increasing demand. Organizations building and maintaining dashboards must move with this intention while the philanthropic sector–and hopefully government–must provide funding in a way that sustains data infrastructure and focus on the outcomes that communities care about.

In Utah, through Promise Partnership Utah’s cross-sector cradle-to-career networks, they built the civic and data infrastructure necessary to test, refine, and scale coordinated strategies. Across six school districts and multiple Promise Communities, partners oriented around shared outcomes, contributing to measurable improvements in student achievement and family stability, all while narrowing disparity gaps. PPU has a large team dedicated to sustaining and improving the data infrastructure. This has enabled the communities to organize around common goals and system measurements and is driving outcomes and system level changes to improve lives in Utah.

The second problem is communities that don’t feel a sense of ownership over the dashboard don’t fight for it.

A dashboard built without meaningful community input is easy to discontinue because nobody outside the organization is demanding it stay. Engagement during the design phase and in all future work — making sure the theory of change, the North Star, and the chosen outcomes actually reflect how residents experience their lives — creates ownership. Ownership creates demand. Demand creates persistence.

United Way of Central Minnesota utilizes a tiered approach to ensure that community input is embedded across every step of their data and measurement processes.Their data governance and architecture and access to both local and public data sources ensures that partners have access to the most current data and consistent analysis that they can trust. For this team, the throughline is ownership — because the infrastructure is governed, documented, and shared, community partners aren’t just recipients of a static report. They’re engaged in a continuous loop where measurement directly informs action, and the community dashboard earns ongoing demand rather than one-off use

Lastly, the foundations are shifting. Federal data is no longer as reliable. It hasn’t vanished, as many worried it would, but it is harder to access, aggregated differently, and some measurements have shifted making longitudinal work increasingly harder. This is one of the most urgent challenges facing community dashboards right now, and it deserves to be named directly. Changes to federal data availability — including significant shifts to census data — are already affecting what place-based initiatives can access and show publicly. Sources that dashboards have depended on for years may no longer exist or may no longer be trustworthy.

Currently, Finding Common Purpose is funding the development of Aligned Impact Muscatine’s community dashboard. AIM has incredibly robust data sharing agreements with partners across the community. The dashboard will merge local data and federal data as needed to develop a dashboard that can meaningfully measure the community’s progress towards their north star goal. The use of local data will provide one model for how to make dashboards not just locally specific, but also more resilient to federal data shifts.

Data availability is a future risk, as well as a present one. Organizations building or maintaining dashboards today need to audit their data sources, diversify where possible, and build contingency plans for the sources most likely to change. A dashboard that can’t adapt to shifting data availability won’t survive the current political moment.

There’s a related version of this problem that’s less visible but equally important: external shocks — a pandemic, an economic downturn, a federal policy reversal — can make a North Star goal feel unreachable and tempt leaders to abandon public measurement altogether. The fix here is better design. Dashboards built for regional comparison can show that even limited progress is meaningful when surrounding areas have regressed. That kind of storytelling keeps a community anchored to its goals when conditions make progress hard.

What happens now:

Losing nearly half of the dashboards we identified three years ago is not evidence that dashboards don’t work. It’s evidence that they need to be built, funded, and supported differently.

If you fund place-based work: treat dashboards as infrastructure, not outputs. Fund their maintenance, not just their creation. Ask your grantees how they plan to sustain them before the grant ends.

If you lead a place-based initiative: the three areas above — data capacity, community engagement, and future-proofing — are where dashboards fail. They’re also where the work of sustaining them begins.

The communities that need this work most are the ones that can least afford to lose the tools that make it visible.