Announcing bcANALYTICS

Watch for future posts about bcANALYTICS here.

Overcoming the major economic and social issues in the city that affect the working poor - jobs, housing, health, child care, and more - requires coordinated data gathering and analysis. Currently, Dallas significantly trails behind its peer cities in this work. Access to reliable, intelligible, and current data can reveal, and help coordinate, the related work of local government, non-profit organizations, business, neighborhood groups, universities, and foundations to improve local decision-making for the advancement of social and physical change in the city. Facilitating the use of data by city and community leaders leads to more targeted and thoughtful response strategies to individual issues, in service to comprehensive strategies.

bcANALYTICS, in partnership with the Communities Foundation of Texas, continues to work with nonprofits of the Data Driven Decision-Making Institute (D3) to deliver tailored analytics reports to fit organizational needs. While these reports answer organization-specific questions, they also address issues shared throughout the region and help guide strategic decision-making for many organizations.

The bcANALYTICS team also works to develop a potential model and implementation proposal to guide Dallas’ incubation of a robust effort to use advanced and continuously updated data to target and inform urban issues affecting the working poor. Research on national best practices will inform this work and help situate Dallas within the national context of organizations using data for community benefit. The project will ultimately evaluate how municipal government, universities, non-profit organizations, consulting agencies, foundations, and others might contribute to a model, and will explore possibilities to advance data sharing and access to address key challenges facing the working poor.

bcANALYTICS also supports other research being undertaken at [bc].