33: More Than the Numbers: Including Qualitative Data in Community Dashboards

The goal of this Birds of a Feather session is to gather evaluators with an interest in including qualitative data in community dashboards and explore ideas around what this has or could look like. Public-facing dashboards remain widely used by local government, state government, and philanthropic organizations to share population-level data about one or many community issues. These dashboards rely heavily on quantitative data from sources such as the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the Centers for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, state and national educational testing data, and other large-scale data sets. As such, public-facing dashboards that also include qualitative data are rare. This does not necessarily need to be the case.