Community Indicators in Wenatchee

Dave Meany over at Eagle Wire alerts us that Patrick Jones is spreading the conversation about community indicators. A recent newspaper article begins:

Something fascinating happened at Wenatchee's Confluence Technology Center last Thursday.

A diverse group of more than 40 leaders representing social service agencies, local governments, businesses and education institutions came together to hear a presentation about developing a database of community indicators to help assess how our communities are doing on key economic and quality-of-life issues.

At the end of that three-hour discussion, they passed around a microphone and every single individual endorsed the concept. Getting that much support that quickly is almost unheard of.

The more people hear about community indicators, the faster the movement grows. Let me know about other community conversations around indicators and I'll share them with the larger readership.

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Telling Stories with Data - New Tools!

I've been playing around with a new tool I found online at http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/BigSmall/index.html

It allows you to do some really interesting things with words (click on the picture above if the text is too small to read).

When done, clicking "print screen" and then copying the picture into an image editing program (paint, PhotoShop, etc.) allows you to customize it.

The same site has other tools like Document Arc Diagrams, Shared Word Diagrams, Text Visualization Tools, and Topic Flowers.

I'm not sure how to best use these yet for a community indicators project. But they're certainly fun tools to play with, so I'm passing them on to you.

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Civic Health Index

I'm a little late bringing you the update to this earlier article. However, better late than never -- and the data are interesting.

From The National Conference on Citizenship:

The National Conference on Citizenship's 2007 Annual Conference on October 4, 2007 released the nation's second Civic Health Index. The principal findings are based on a comprehensive national survey conducted by Harris Interactive and various government data sources.

Our new survey and data collected by the government suggest that there has been no recovery in 2007. In fact, there is evidence of further decline in some indicators, such as trust in other people and levels of charitable contributions. We also know that some of the few hopeful signs we saw emerge after 9/11 and that continued for a number of years, such as a wave of volunteering particularly among young people, have now fallen back to earlier levels. Our civic stocks are low, which is unusual in a time of war.

A closer look, however, gives us a foundation from which to build. This year's report identifies three important points that complicate the story of decline and may stimulate constructive ideas for how to move forward to improve our civic life.

Learn about these signs of hope and more inside this year's Civic Health Index.

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Call for Papers: Performance Measurement

From the Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Network:

On-Going Call for Papers for PPMR newest section:
Emerging Issues in Performance Management

Public Performance and Management Review is pleased to announce its newest feature: Emerging Issues in Performance Management. The goals of this new section are to identify critical issues facing government and nonprofit agencies as they improve their performance and accountability, and to encourage future research on those issues. The manuscripts in this new section are expected to be approximately 4000 words long, excluding references.

We are looking for papers that deal with:

• performance measurement;
• performance reporting;
• uses of performance measurement;

All articles in this section will be peer-reviewed. Please send your submissions for consideration by e-mail to:

Dr. Patria de Lancer Julnes, Section Editor
Patria.julnes [at] usu.edu

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Regional Equity Conference

Sarah Treuhaft, at PolicyLink, sent this message to the NNIP listserve:

The early bird deadline is fast approaching for Regional Equity '08: The Third National Summit on Equitable Development, Social Justice, and Smart Growth, in New Orleans from March 5-7. Hosted by PolicyLink, the summit will gather over 1,000 leaders from the nonprofit, public policy, philanthropic, business, and academic arenas to explore critical issues and trends and share innovative policy and organizing strategies to advance social and economic equity. The summit will also provide an arena for discussing where we are as a field and how to scale up our efforts to have greater impact. Confirmed speakers include Joan Walsh, Van Jones, Tavis Smiley, Manuel Pastor, Gilda Haas, Myron Orfield, and dozens more inspiring leaders and practitioners.

The third summit, like the previous two events, has much to offer to people working within the data and indicators field. Context-setting sessions on major trends in housing, community health, poverty and inequality, development patterns, federal and state policy, and more will provide the big picture. Information-sharing and skill-building workshops will focus on specific topics like transit-oriented development, access to healthy food, and community benefits agreements as well as research, coalition-building, organizing, and policy strategies.

A number of sessions on data, mapping, research, and neighborhood information systems will focus on trends and innovations in the field, including:

- The Latest Research to Make the Case for Regional Equity

- Using Data and Maps to Support Equitable Development

- Show and Tell: Test Drive Neighborhood Information Systems

- Pre-Summit Equity Institute Training on Parcel Data Systems

Please join us at the event! The early bird $66 discount will expire December 17th. Scholarships are available for representatives of grassroots organizations. Go to http://www.regionalequity08.org/ to find out more, register, and spread the word.

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Graphing Tautologies

OK, so it's a little silly.

Let me know if you use the graph in your next indicators report, though.

Special thanks to Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics.

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Philanthropic Giving Made Personal

Check out this graphic from rethos.com:


From the article:

If you are still of the opinion that philanthropy is only for big foundations and the super-rich like Bill Gates, check out the pie chart above. According to the folks at GiveWell, “individual donors give over 100 times as much as the Gates Foundation and over 6 times as much as all foundations combined.”

I liked the presentation of the data -- the story it tells is one of citizen efficacy and the powerful nature of individual philanthropic giving. The graph seems to say, "Feel good about giving! You and me together give way more than Bill Gates" (which is true as long as the "you" is highly inclusive and involves a hundred million other people.)

But there's an element of story-telling in the graphic that adds a personalized, recognizable touch to the data -- puts a face and context on a part of the numbers -- which makes it easier to connect to the information. I suspect there's a lesson in this for those of us working with community indicators.

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The Science of Indicators

I'd like you to take a moment and read this article by Mallen Baker on indicators and communication. It comes from a business perspective rather than a community perspective, but the processes and principles should seem really familiar.

In the article, called "Responsibility reporting – Now write a shorter letter, better," Baker discussed how people are determining which indicators to report.

The clincher is found in the last paragraph -- "The question is whether we have been trying too hard to make this kind of communication into a science, when really it is art."

What's your feedback? Are we working on the science of community indicators, or the art? In my experiences, the art of community indicators consists in transforming a largely academic exercise into something that resonates with the community. How have you seen that happen?

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Big Cities Health Inventory

The Big Cities Health Inventory 2007: The Health of Urban USA provides city-to-city comparisons of leading measures of health, presenting a broad overview of the health of the 54 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. Produced with funding from NACCHO's Metro Forum, this report is the fifth edition of a compendium of health status indicators designed to provide usable information for evidence-based decision making.

To download a free PDF of this publication, visit: http://www.naccho.org/topics/crosscutting/documents/BCHI07COLORFINAL.pdf

From the introduction from NACCHO (National Association of County & City Health Officials):

We are very pleased to release the fifth edition of the Big Cities Health Inventory (BCHI), a compendium of health status indicators produced in a comparative format for the 54 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. This report fills an information gap that, despite great advances in information technology over the past decade, still persists today. Data on the health of our communities are probably more widely available at this time than at any point in the past. The Internet has become a vast repository of statistics on a variety health conditions. But less progress has been made in turning these raw data into usable information, especially for the nation's largest urban areas which face higher rates of poor health status and racial/ethnic disparities in illness and access to health care services.

Several key principles of public health practice depend on having reliable and current information regarding the health status of the community. The most obvious of these principles is evidence-based decision making and the core science of public health, epidemiology, is grounded in the collection and analysis of data.

Perhaps an even more fundamental principle is social justice and the recognition that eliminating health disparities is critical to improving the health of the overall population. For highly diverse urban populations, understanding the root causes of health disparities, including the synergistic interplay of social and environmental stressors that contribute to the erosion of resiliency in many of our nation's urban communities, is necessary to accomplish this goal.

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Globescan Survey Results

In a survey prior to the Beyond GDP conference, GlobeScan asked 1,000 people in 10 countries which of two points of view was closest to their own:

• that governments should measure national progress using money-based statistics because economic growth is the most important focus for the country; or
• that health, social and environmental statistics are as important as economic ones and that governments should also use these for measuring national progress.

Here are their results:

Support for the ‘beyond GDP’ statement is especially strong in developed countries. The French and Italians are most enthusiastic, with 85 percent of people supporting true wealth measures from health and social statistics. Only 10 percent support purely economic indices. In the developing nations of India and Kenya, around 70 percent agree with the broader growth measures, but a significant minority of 27 percent still believe in economics alone.

This survey was conducted by GlobeScan, on behalf of Ethical Markets Media, in June to August 2007, and looked at opinions in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Italy, Kenya and Russia. Alignment in the United States seems likely. Previous studies (from the Americans Talk Issues Foundation) have shown up to 79 percent approval of a ‘scorecard’ of quality of life indicators in the United States.

For more information, see GlobeScan.

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Corporate Sustainability Reports and Sustainable Investing

I enjoyed the conversation at the Beyond GDP conference on socially responsible investing. If you like the topic, here's a blog you might like.

The KLD Blog is geared towards conversations around sustainable investing, which they call "the integration of environmental, social and governance factors into security analysis and the investment process."

I liked the updates on mandatory CSR reporting in Malaysia and a conversation about putting CSR in a historical context of public purposes and corporations. It's an interesting conversation.

Ron Robins suggested we also look at investingforthesoul.com, which also looks interesting.

My focus is on community-based indicators, and so what I'm more interested in is how the information market is shifting to provide more privately-generated data about social and ecological impacts. If we can find a way to tease community-focused data out of the developing CSR formats, I think we may be able to get something icredibly useful for our community work.

In the meantime, I'm interested in hearing from you if there are other places we should be looking at to understand what's happening in the triple bottom line or corporate sustainability reports movements.

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