Thanks to Abel Harding and his JaxPoliticsOnline blog for this video of yesterday's press conference at City Hall, where local nonprofits used data to make their case that city funding for nonprofits not be slashed during these difficult financial times.

I thought you might enjoy the different ways the numbers are presented and displayed -- comparisons to familiar terms, straight-up statistics, visual representations of the numbers, and more.



Any thoughts?

At Indicators Session Report-Out, you can see the working notes of a community indicators project being developed in Buffalo, New York. The actual project site is at creativelysustainable.com.

I enjoy seeing these projects in their development stages, before the shiny graphics and glossy report covers get put on. This is community organizing to determine what's important, finding ways to measure it, and then using those measures to make sustainable change for the future -- how wonderful!

The discussion they had highlighted a number of reasons why they felt community indicators were important:

• Increased community awareness
• Can’t improve what you can’t measure
• Can’t learn from the past if things are not recorded
• Can’t unite people if they don’t have similar understanding
• Helps to diffuse myths and misperceptions
• Let’s people have a way to know when to celebrate progress
• It improves decision making quality

Greensboro, North Carolina, is farther along in their indicators project development. First of all, they have one of the cooler names I've seen for a community indicators system: The "GreensbOrometer."
Greensboro, also, developed a set of reasons why they needed a community indicators system:

The most important and compelling reason Greensboro should implement a Community Indicators System is that the Connections 2025 Comprehensive Plan specifically directs the City to "create an ongoing housing and neighborhood condition monitoring strategy" (Policy 6A.3). Beyond this mandate however, a Community Indicators System is a valuable tool for:

• Measuring quality of life;
• Monitoring provision of public services;
• Identifying disparities of opportunity; and
• Promoting responsive, accountable, effective, efficient, and equitable government.

Whatever the reasons, I like seeing more community projects grow. If you're in either the Buffalo or Greensboro areas, why don't you see if you can lend a hand to these efforts. If you're not, take a look at what they're doing and lend them your moral support -- this is important stuff we're doing!

I don't know if you've seen the Government Assessment Portal (GAP) Newsletter yet, but I'd like to draw it to your attention because of the creative ways people are measuring government performance.

Articles in the newsletter include:

• Bhutan: Planning for happiness
• Angola: On its way to better local governance
• Chile: Taking stock of democratic progress
• Workshop in Cairo: Assessment Methods and Application of Governance Evidence
• Workshop in Namibia: Call for participants
• Work in the Pipeline

Take a peek, especially on the challenges Bhutan is facing on trying to operationalize its focus on Gross National Happiness and Chile's efforts to "develop a governance assessment in Chile through a multi-stakeholder nationally driven process."

The Council of Community Services, in partnership with the United Way of Roanoke Valley, just released their second annual Roanoke Regional Community Indicators Report (PDF).

From their website:

The report updates key household economic indicators, presentations of valuable data that show change over time, for eight jurisdictions in the Roanoke/Alleghany Region. The report tracks the original 39 indicators and adds two key education indicators for a total of 41 indicators. Job related, education, income and asset related, housing, public assistance, low income and other categories of indicators are included in this updated, data rich, 2009 Edition.

The Council of Community Services is now tracking a limited number of economic indicators on a monthly basis for the Roanoke/Alleghany Region. This report, 2009 Economic Indicators: Monthly Trends (PDF) provides valuable indicator data for the eight jurisdictions in the Roanoke Region. The data covers the period from January to June 2009.

They've done a nice job of selecting indicators on a regional level and reporting them for the region and for each of the eight jurisdictions the region covers. For policy-makers and planners, this is an important tool for their region. They also do a nice job of taking advantage of the new ACS 3-year estimates for smaller-population jurisdictions. If you're not using this tool, you may want to check out how Roanoke can capture important information that was simply not available before outside of the decennial census.

Take a look!

(Read more about the report at The Roanoke Times.)

... and yet it's funny. Check it out at Wow Factor Added To Corporate Presentation:

Now that they've added the final touches of wow factor to Thursday's presentation, employees seem confident their pitch is a can't-miss.

"To think about what our presentation was before it had that sort of, you know, that wow factor, is kind of embarrassing," account supervisor Scott Weston said. "It was mostly just slides of straight statistics and comprehensive charts that explained very plainly that in order to more successfully get the word out about our clients, we should utilize all types of media."

Added Weston: "It would have been over in 30 seconds."

Nice send-up of our tendencies sometimes to overdo the data visualization in ways that obscure the message.

(Hat tip: The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method)