Democratizing Data: Enterprise Community Partners Brings New Tool to Community Development

With the Opportunity360 Measurement tool, users could gain insight into five aspects of opportunity for their neighborhood: housing stability, education, health and well-being, economic security, and mobility. A huge value for economic and community developers who need to make data-driven decisions. But it wasn’t enough.

Users wanted to compare census tracts. They wanted to better understand where a neighborhood had been and where it was going. They wanted to access data related to emerging issues, such as climate change. And they wanted additional context for the data.

Enterprise didn't need to tell one story about community development. It needed a way to empower users to discover and share their own. With deeper data and a narrative-driven focus, Opportunity360 could deliver Community Dashboards centered around more dynamic personalization, context, and analysis of opportunity for users.

The impact of Enterprise in community development and mySidewalk's public data storytelling experience made the partnership make sense, but mission alignment is what drove the teams to create an entirely new experience built around transformation. As put by Andrew Masters, Strategic Partnership Manager of Knowledge, Impact & Strategy with Enterprise: 

"Working with mySidewalk has allowed us to do more than build a dashboard that informs crucial work, tells a story, and crafts a narrative. It’s allowed us to create an interactive tool that enables our partners to facilitate a conversation about community transformation."

To drive these conversations anywhere and everywhere, mySidewalk leveraged their dashboard generation technology, Press, to help power the data stories told by Opportunity360. This included 3 pillars: creating an accessible landing page for users to enter an address and request a dashboard, providing more comprehensive data analyses and crafted narrative in the dashboards, and deploying a smooth, on-demand user experience for users to receive them. With these together, Opportunity360 received the boost needed to generate stories of opportunity and scale the tool's impact.

Guiding data-driven investment, Opportunity360 now has the ability to select and compare multiple census tracts, provide current data that updates alongside mySidewalk's Data Library that powers the dashboards, and offer deeper analyses such as time series visualizations with decades of historical data. In addition, user information can now be collected to better understand the people and places being served and create deeper relationships for development. As De Scisciolo stated, Enterprise was ecstatic:

“mySidewalk has made it easy to analyze what’s going on in communities across multiple dimensions. Being able to disaggregate data by race brings to light disparities and the time-series data especially helps people understand where we’ve been and where we’re going."

Ultimately, Enterprise needed a way to provide a comprehensive resource that multiplied the impacts being made across the country. Working with mySidewalk's data and story experts, they knew that a next-level Opportunity360 tool powered by Press was the right answer. 

Developing a tool that accomplishes each of those areas isn't an easy undertaking. Of course, doing what's easy doesn't drive innovation and change at the level Enterprise does.

Not only does Opportunity360 drive change for users, but the innovators at Enterprise are better positioned to demonstrate their leadership faster and more efficiently. As put by Masters:

“In the past when we’ve been asked to analyze lots of data, it took time and expertise. The Opportunity360 Community Dashboard puts data in the hands of all types of users and allows them to interact with it comfortably. By working with mySidewalk, Enterprise has scaled a much-needed data solution and has put data at the center of community transformation.”

At the end of the day, the purpose of Opportunity360 isn't just integrating datasets or designing a scalable experience. Those are (critical) parts of a larger story: creating affordable, inclusive, and successful communities for anyone, because everyone deserves opportunity. Innovative work is the result of innovative partners, as Masters stated:

“If someone were on the fence about working with mySidewalk, I would tell them, do it. The mySidewalk team was a crucial partner. They worked to not just build a tool, but to understand what we were trying to accomplish. Their goal was to design a full experience that would get us to where we wanted to be. Using mySidewalk allows us to have a data-driven conversation about opportunity.”

mySidewalk is honored to partner with leaders like Enterprise Community Partners to democratize data for a larger impact. Interact with the tool for yourself to generate a dashboard of opportunity in your own community, just like this one. If you'd like to explore how mySidewalk can scale your data and storytelling to the next level, schedule a free consultation and we'd love to hear about your unique mission and goals.