2018 Impact Summit

Community Indicators efforts often use action and moving the needle as a rallying point for launching their web sites. However, when it comes to using data to drive decision making and measure progress, finding the right data can seem like a Goldilocks endeavor- some data have too large an estimation error, others have too small a sample, and yet others have too long a period between measurements. Finding the data source that is "just right" can take considerable community collaboration and data sharing. We share lessons learned from the experience of Central New York as it learned of its number 1 national ranking for concentrated poverty and then sought to create a local measure that could be used to identify progress. The result has been a work in progress scale the includes data routinely collected and mapped from a series of partners.