How Do You Use Community Indicators?

I was asked recently about how community indicators are actually used in a community to make things better. The context of the question was this: Someone new stepped into an organization that had an existing (and very good) community indicators program. She interviewed key stakeholders in her community and found two general responses: first, that people knew of and appreciated the community indicators project; second, that no one was quite sure what to do with it.

I suspect this is a question most of us face in our communities. What do you do with these indicators reports? Let me share with you an edited/expanded version of my answer, and get your feedback on anything I left out or need to clarify.

I firmly feel that community indicators need to serve as an integral part of a community change model. I've talked about that before on this blog, and I'll likely be talking about it again. We don't do indicators because they're pretty, or cool, or nice to have (though they are all of the above.) We do indicators because we want to help make the community better.

This community change model, the way we use it in Jacksonville, begins with a shared vision for the future. You have to have at least a broad idea of where you want to go.

The indicators then measure where we are in relation to that vision – are we getting closer to the desired future, or farther away. The indicators are not just about the specific aspects they measure – high school graduation rates aren’t just about high school seniors, but provide an overall proxy measurement of the effectiveness of the entire school system to achieve the desired results. The indicators point to areas of progress and areas that need greater community attention.

But the indicators themselves don’t identify solutions. They are descriptive, not prescriptive. They flag items of community concern, not just because we care about (in this example) education, but because this is an area we need to work on to improve our overall community and get closer to our shared vision. They set a general community agenda for action.

When the indicators identify priorities for community action, they need to trigger some sort of planning process. The indicator says something’s not working right in our current systems – what do we do about it? This planning process needs to identify strategies for action. Who will do what to address the issues identified by the indicators?

These plans need to be implemented. Someone needs to make sure the community follows through. This is where the indicators inform the decision-making processes of community institutions, from government to nonprofits to business entities and faith institutions and anyone else with a vested interest in the community. This is why the “shared vision” part is critical – to achieve the shared vision will usually take shared action, and people/institutions stepping out of traditional roles to address the shared community priorities identified by the indicators. This is one of the great strengths of the community indicators process: moving a community issue from “their problem” to “our problem.”

The actions will have results, and those outcomes need to be identified. The real success of the efforts to improve the community should be evaluated/assessed through the indicators themselves – did our strategies work? Did we make a difference? Based on what the indicators tell us, we may need to revisit our vision, rethink what we are measuring, or go back to the drawing board and develop new strategies for action.

That’s both why indicators are so important, and how to use them effectively:

1. To identify shared priorities for action;
2. To inform strategies and community planning efforts;
3. To hold the community accountable for action;
4. To assess results and evaluate success; and
5. To measure progress toward a shared community vision.

That’s the general overview. There isn't one right way to make them work, or one right set of actors to use the indicators to make change. In Jacksonville, the community indicators are used:

1. To inform philanthropic grant-making efforts
2. To develop Chamber of Commerce focus actions
3. To create the annual curriculum for our Leadership Jacksonville programs
4. To identify topics for public television/radio programming
5. To support grant-writing efforts
6. To influence legislation and policy-making at the local, state, and national level
7. To ask for community investment and increased corporate responsibility from local corporations
8. To bring together collaborative partnerships around an issue and break down silos
9. To highlight areas for further study, both in our own organization and in academic and other research areas

And more. As the indicators become institutionalized in the community, their influence broadens, but the role of the community indicators practitioner, besides sharing the data, is to help insure that they are being actively used to galvanize action.

How we do that is the subject of another blog post.

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NAPC Conference: Community Planning 101

On Monday afternoon, the National Association of Planning Councils held a workshop called Community Planning 101.

Community planning as performed by planning councils is not defined by organizational structure, collaborative partnerships, funding streams, functional areas, topics under discussion, or the kinds of flowcharts you might see in an analytical definition. Especially in today's rapidly-shifting environment when technology, tools, and information are transforming before our eyes.

Instead, something else defines the work.

Peter Stoddard said, "“Planning councils are defined primarily by their agency value structures." 

The NAPC defines those values as follows:

1. Commitment to community and involvement of a broad and diverse constituency
2. Comprehensive perspective reflected in decisions and actions
3. Inclusive decision-making that strives for consensus
4. Diverse viewpoints respected and encouraged in decisions and actions
5. Positive working relationships with all sectors of the community
6. Objective data and information used to support decisions and action
7. Focus on systems change and sustainable, long-term solutions
8. Principled leadership producing measurable results

More information on community planning and planning councils is available at www.communityplanning.org.

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NAPC Conference: Keepin' It Weird in Austin, Texas

I'm in Austin, Texas today for the 2009 Conference of the National Association of Planning Councils (NAPC). I'm looking forward to some pretty exciting sessions, and will be sharing some tidbits here as the conference goes along.

I've mentioned NAPC before, but here's a couple of things you ought to know about the organization:

• Planning councils are in to measuring community indicators in a big way. The Reno conference that launched the Community Indicators Consortium was co-sponsored by NAPC, and they have held joint conferences with CIC to help share the importance of measuring trends at the local level.
• Planning councils are action-oriented kinds of organizations. They use information to inform policy, shape decision-making, implement programs, and make life better for people in the communities they serve.
• Planning councils are struggling. People (governments, philanthropic organizations, individuals) like to fund direct service. Big-picture stuff is a harder sell -- but it's the big picture that makes the direct service work work. Figuring out what needs doing, what's working, what's not working, and where the resources need to be targeted is even more critical in times of resource scarcity.

OK, I'm off my soapbox now. If you're working for a planning council, good for you. If not, go support your local planning council. And if your community no longer has one -- if budget crunches and active neglect has forced the planning council to close its doors or morph into just a direct service organization -- now would be a really good time to try to bring it back.

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Spartanburg, Indicators Reports, and Community Engagement

I like how the Spartanburg community came together to talk about the challenges raised in their new community indicators report. There's a video available at the site (I couldn't get this one to embed properly), but you may want to take a look at it.

The meeting raises the challenge all indicator projects must face: how do you move from reporting the problems to solving them? We know providing the data alone is insufficient to solving the problem (though may times it serves as a necessary precondition for action). We also know that, while indicators reports sometimes catalyze community action by raising the key issues of the community, more often than not the report itself highlights the problem, sparks a little conversation, and then (if left alone) people move on.

At the same time, no one organization can solve all the community's problems. We know that. But when we report on all the community's problems, and people ask us what we're going to do to fix them, we can inadvertently create expectations of problem ownership (especially if no one else is talking about the problem or is stepping forward to lead community action.)

So what do we do about it? Some thoughts follow:

I've suggested before that community indicators are one piece in an overall model for community improvement. I'll likely say it a few more times.

Right now, though, what I want to focus in on is the need for a credible, neutral source in the community that can take a bigger-picture view of the aspects of a community that contribute to good living/high quality of life/healthy/sustainable community (whatever your framework for describing what's important about where you life.)

Lots of people and organizations are working on issues. For each of these, the most important issue is the one they are facing today. Their voices, especially in a time of relative resource scarcity, keep getting louder as they fight for a place in community priorities and attention. Some people are more effective at being heard than others. Some become too effective in getting their message out until it becomes overkill and people stop listening -- there are only so many times you can hear that the sky is falling before you start resenting the calls for action. (Just check out the latest poll numbers on global warming -- the intensity and omnipresence of the message is spurring a backlash, and the weather isn't helping.)

In a worst-case scenario, people and organizations get so tied to a message that others actively shut out content and replace it with caricature. (Take PETA, for example -- they've done a pretty good job of alienating people from hearing a set of important ethical messages, in my opinion. Somewhere along the way they stopped sharing information and started looking like desperate folks who will do anything to get attention. Can anyone with a straight face tell me that their banned Superbowl ad helped advance community discussion? Or when exploiting women became OK if it was in the cause of not exploiting animals? OK, I'll stop ranting.)

The strength of a community indicators report is the ability, again in my opinion, to rise above the issue-specific turf wars and get people to see the community through a wider lens. This helps issues get framed as parts of overall systems. It demonstrates interrelatedness of problems. It tears down silos. It encourages collaborative action.

The temptation is to dive in on a particular issue and begin leading the charge. On the plus side, this issue may need a champion, and the community is looking at you already and wants to know what you are going to do about it. You can galvanize the community, you can with intentionality forge those coalitions. You can be the voice of the community and lead action to make things better!

The negative side to that is twofold. First, You dove into the pool. You became just another advocacy organization. From now on, your report will be viewed differently -- no longer above the fray, you're now talking about how everything relates with your issue. It changes how you are seen, and how your report is perceived.

Second, you've used your community capital on that issue. It will be twice as hard to try to tackle another issue. You're in the pool already, so can't dive in as the lifeguard to rescue another community problem with quite as much ease, especially since that problem is likely still hanging on to you for dear life.

Third, when you jumped in, others were free to stay out. They could go on with their lives, secure in the knowledge that you were taking care of the problem. You and they lost the opportunity to see who else could be a lifesaver. You took the pressure off the community and put it on yourself.

The good news is that a strong model of community improvement can keep you (and your community) afloat, even in tough times. I'll talk more about that model in another post. In the meantime, congratulations to Spartanburg (and to all the rest of you out there) for keeping those community conversations alive. The problems out there are too big for just one organization, even a really cool one that knows how to do indicators.

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Community Planning and Stuck in an Airport in Memphis

I was on my way to Milwaukee this morning to give a presentation, and the plane that I was on had mechanical problems and ended up stranding me in an airport in Memphis. Deprived of the ability to see me in person (they didn't know any better!), the organizers asked me to call in and share a few thoughts over a spekerphone about community planning. I wrote up some rough ideas to share, and thought this group might like to react to those thoughts as well.

I don't claim that these are the most profound thoughts one might have about community planning, nor that these are even the three best thoughts to share. But since community indicators are an integral piece of community planning efforts -- you can't plan without data, and data without planning is just a pretty toy -- you may have some better thoughts or reactions to these ideas you'd like to share.

So here are my remarks:

Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to take just a few minutes and talk with you today. I regret not being there in person, but apparently all those dials and lights in an airplane cockpit mean something, and when they start going haywire, we're not able to fly on that plane.

This is National Community Planning Month, and in honor of that I'd like to share just a couple of thoughts about community planning and planning councils.

First thought: We don't know what we don't know. I know that seems obvious, but it's an essential reason why planning is so critical. The corollary to that is: We do what we know. As a university friend reminds me often, the systems we have in place today are perfectly designed for the results we are getting. And when the results we are getting today are not the results we want, we do more of what we know how to do. But if we have the wrong people or institutions doing the wrong things, or not having the right people or institutions doing the better things, it doesn't matter how efficient we are in doing what we keep doing. It doesn't matter how well we do it, or how much more of it we do with less, or how long we've done it, or even whether we're a national model for the best doing of this stuff. If what we're doing isn't working, we ought to consider doing something different. And if we do what we know, than doing something different will require knowing something different. And if we don't know what we don't know, we need to engage the community differently in planning to discover what we need to know to do something better.

Second thought: Failure to plan is planning for failure. You've heard this before. We have recent national tragedies that remind us of this. Katrina comes to mind. Communities today are facing problems of magnitudes and consequences far beyond what we have in the past. The way people interact, the rapid changes in population from immigration to racial and ethnic diversity to aging and increasing lifespans, the unbelievable growth of technology and how quickly it reshapes the economy and social interactions, the spreading problem of disparities and inequities, the rapid shift in basic knowledge – what we know about brain chemistry today makes most of what we knew ten years ago nearly obsolete! -- the incredible shrinking of the world and impacts of globalization, the restructuring of our relationships to traditional community institutions and government – we're far beyond our ability to either act like nothing's changing or to just wing it and hope for the best. We have to plan. We have no choice if we want to survive.

Third thought: Plans change. They have to. The General Rules of Warfare say that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” The same is true in community planning. The same is true in asking someone to speak about community planning! The world is highly complex and in constant flux. The best-laid plans don't always play out the way you want them to. The rate of change in the world is astounding. Check your 401K for details! So why plan? Two reasons: first, planning finds answers and approaches better than anything else, and puts you in a better place to achieve success. Second, and perhaps just as important, the community planning process brings people together in new ways and builds shared understanding and collaborative agreements that give you the flexibility and adaptability you need to tackle the problem together. Let me repeat: The process of community planning is often as critical to community success as the outcomes of that planning.

Thoughts? Comments? Rotten tomatoes?

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