Making Space for Tracking What Matters in Your Community
- Ana Ranković
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Welcome to Making Space, our newsletter for nonprofit leaders navigating the real and challenging work of becoming more data-driven.
In this issue:
How place-based initiatives can track “North Star” community outcomes without getting lost in too much data
Applications for our next cohort of grant-sponsored Community Dashboards open this fall
In Conversation with Nonprofit Data Leaders: David Harrington, Director of United for Brownsville
Let's get into it.
Olivia & Charles from North Arrow
Tracking What Matters in Your Community
The Problem: Most place-based initiatives lack a clear, ongoing view of how their community is performing on the outcomes that matter most to them. Without that visibility, it's hard to set long-term goals, steer programming, or show funders and policymakers that the work is moving the needle.
Finding Common Purpose, a funder collaborative focused on place-based work, cataloged 572 place-based initiatives across the country and found that only 40% track outcomes at all, and just 14% have a community dashboard of any kind.
Where community dashboards do exist, they usually fall into one of two traps: sprawling platforms buried in too much data with no clear focus, or one-off reports that don’t get updated.
The problem isn't a lack of available data. Most of the outcomes that matter to place-based work, like housing affordability, health indicators, early childhood benchmarks, and educational attainment, are publicly available. The problem is that no one has curated, contextualized, and presented them in a way that connects to the organization's specific mission and geography.
Without a reliable way to see where the community is now and how the situation is trending, organizations are essentially making decisions without sufficient information.
So where do you start?
The Solution: A simple, curated community dashboard that gives your organization a tailored perspective on the outcomes that matter most, with the ability to track trends, compare benchmarks, and engage your community around the data.
The answer is in presenting the right data clearly, for the right audience. In practice, that means:
A curated set of public outcomes chosen to match your organization's focus areas: The selection process matters as much as the tool itself. Working with an organization to narrow hundreds of available indicators down to the handful that genuinely reflect their theory of change is where the real value starts. When indicators are chosen intentionally, every data point on the dashboard has a purpose and a story behind it.
Benchmarks that let you compare your community to neighboring areas, county averages, or state trends: A number on its own doesn't tell you much. But comparing your community's outcomes to a neighboring area, a city average, or a state trend turns data into insights.
Map-based views that anchor the data in the geography you actually serve: Seeing outcomes mapped at a granular level (census tracts, neighborhoods, school zones) reveals patterns that tables and charts miss. It shows where needs are concentrated and where programs are reaching.
Longitudinal trends that show how those outcomes are shifting over time. Perhaps reading proficiency is lower in the community you're serving than throughout the city; however, without the trendline you might miss if it’s been trending upwards, confirming that your efforts are working.
A community engagement layer where residents and stakeholders can ask questions and get answers
An interface that's simple and nearly cost-free to maintain and update.
An organization doing this well
Over the past year, we partnered with Finding Common Purpose and three place-based initiatives to co-build a Starter Community Dashboard service from the ground up. The result is a streamlined, replicable solution designed to make community dashboards accessible to organizations that have never had one.
United for Brownsville (Brooklyn, NY) works to ensure Black and Brown children in Brownsville have the same opportunities as children in the city's wealthiest neighborhoods. They came to the process with a strong data foundation and a clear theory of change.
Choosing the right indicators
Through a guided selection process, United for Brownsville narrowed their focus to 7 North
Star indicators:
Early Childhood:
Pre-K enrollment (% of 3-4 year olds in Pre-K)
3rd Grade ELA proficiency
8th Grade Math proficiency
Disconnected Youth (% not in school nor employed)
Housing:
Housing Cost (% spending >30% of income)
Family Well-Being:
Fertility Rate
Child Poverty (% of households with children living <150% of poverty level)
Each indicator was chosen because it directly connects to their mission and programs. Rather than tracking everything available, UB selected outcomes where their work can visibly move the needle and where trends over time tell a meaningful story about whether Brownsville is closing the gap with the rest of the city.
Choosing the right benchmarks
Because UB's mission is explicitly about equity between neighborhoods, their benchmark comparison had to reflect that. The dashboard compares Brownsville's outcomes to the city average and to select neighborhoods, so that every indicator is viewed through the lens of whether children in Brownsville are getting closer to the same opportunities as those in the city's wealthiest communities.
An outcome scorecard introduces the rest of the dashboard
The Indicator Scorecard
To give leadership and stakeholders an immediate, high-level view, we built an Indicator Scorecard that summarizes where Brownsville stands across all selected measures and compares them to the chosen benchmarks. This serves as the entry point to the dashboard. At a glance, anyone can see which outcomes are improving, which are lagging, and where the gap between Brownsville and the comparison neighborhoods is widest. From there, dedicated tabs offer a spatial deep dive on each indicator, mapping data at the census tract level so the team can see exactly where within Brownsville the needs are most concentrated and target programming accordingly.
Dedicated outcome tabs show how the community performs compared to relevant benchmarks, and visualizes data at the census tract granularity.
Their dashboard has become a central part of how they do their work. Director David Harrington has been walking into community convenings with printed maps from the dashboard, facilitating conversations about what residents see in the data, and using the tool to draft research questions about indicators that surprise them. For them, the dashboard also represents a meeting place for the community.
In Conversation with Nonprofit Data Leaders: David Harrington, Director of United for Brownsville
In July, we will be hosting David Harrington, Director of United for Brownsville, to share with us how the organization's dashboard has been shaping up critical conversations amongst team members and residents, and how he is personally using it as a tool for engagement and strategy.
💬 Got thoughts?
If this sparks something, an idea, a question, a data challenge you’re wrestling with, let’s talk.
Until next time,
- The North Arrow team
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