New for Year Two: The Dashboard Launches 4 Exciting Features

You may have noticed that the Dashboard looks a little different. That’s because we’ve been hard at work on some updates to the site. For the last 6 months, our team has been working on new features, analyzing more data than we ever have, and researching innovative strategies to help you create healthier and more equitable communities. We’ve streamlined our navigation, including the metric selector, which we hope will make it easier and more intuitive to find what you need on the site.

Here’s what else is new and exciting:

Looking Through Time: Multi-Year Data

We now have multi-year data for 29 metrics, with some going back to 2013. You can switch between years of data with the drop down menu, as you can see in the image below.  With new multi-year data, users can see changes over time across metrics and neighborhoods throughout a city.

Interested in exploring this new data but unsure where to begin? Check out our best practices for using multi-year data.

New Data Visualization: Metric Comparison Maps

Our new metric comparison map can be used to understand the relationships and geographic patterns between two metrics. You can access these maps on the Compare Across Metrics tab on your city’s page.

While these maps can’t tell you that one measure causes the other, they can give you an idea of how measures like children in poverty and frequent mental distress move together across neighborhoods within a city. This can provide important context for policies and programs aimed at addressing these issues.

New Resources for Driving Change: Enhanced Take Action Center

We’ve also added some exciting new content to the Take Action page. You can access the Take Action page from both the navigation bar within your city’s page and from the Main Menu. The Take Action section now provides 5 categories of actionable tools created by organizations and websites we trust to help you drive change in your community:

• Find Policies and Programs provides example policies and programs that have either been studied extensively in the academic literature or are promising examples of what is working in cities, similar to the content we’ve been providing. In this new version, we’ve added a number of new sources that can be implemented around your community.

• Find Partners can help you identify websites and organizations as potential collaborators to help you achieve your goals.

• Explore Strategies provides guidance for communication, advocacy, stakeholder engagement, and others important tools for action, curated by audience type.

• Find Funding identifies the diverse funding streams available to users and provides tips on how to obtain this financial support.

• Measure Impact provides tools to help users leverage data to support their work and evaluate their impact.

Easier Data Access: Introducing our API

In addition to our downloadable .csv data files, we’ve also launched an API. You can find the API and downloadable data on our Data Access page on the main menu. Where relevant, multi-year data will be available through the API but our downloadable .csvs will only contain the most recent year of data for every metric. With an API, you’re able to pull our data from the site even easier to conduct your own analyses, integrate with local data platforms, and create new data visualizations.

We cannot wait for you to start exploring our new and improved website. Let us know what you think by connecting with us on Twitter and Facebook or emailing us at [email protected]!