Strategies for Expanding Indicator Profiles to Small Rural Geographies

Abstract

Indicator projects that provide data for small area geographies have largely focused on more dense, urban communities. Yet several years ago, Minnesota Compass , a social indicators project that has provided data profiles for neighborhoods in Minnesota’s two largest cities, decided to expand its products to include small area profiles for cities and towns throughout the state. To find out if our expanded profiles satisfied the data needs of our newest users , we decided to hold a series of listening sessions in greater Minnesota. We encountered two challenges, and organizations with a similar interest can benefit from learning what we did to overcome them. In this chapter, we first explain how we called upon existing partnerships in greater Minnesota to help organize the listening sessions to learn about the strengths and needs of communities across the state. We then discuss how we distilled the feedback we received to improve the profiles we had already created for communities in greater Minnesota.