Community Voice as Actionable Data

Traditional data can’t tell us how our biggest problems feel right now — only people can do that. 

Mayors, commissioners, nonprofit executives, and community leaders make countless decisions that affect us all—policies, programs, plans, and investments. However, the information they use to make those decisions doesn’t always reflect the community's priorities, opinions, and values. 

While publicly available federal and state data are incredible at helping us directionally understand communities, they offer limited insights into their diverse needs and fail to provide real-time insights into what and how people think and feel. This is particularly necessary when something specific happens at the local level—be it the implementation of a new safety policy, a new infrastructure investment, or the election of a new school district superintendent. 

A better understanding of a community’s priorities, opinions, and values can help a municipality develop a new housing policy, inform a local foundation's funding strategy, or develop messaging for mental health organizations that better meet the community’s needs. 

For example, even though the mayor may know that crime is a top issue citywide, experiences vary across neighborhoods, leading to different possible approaches to finding solutions: more police presence, less police presence, different training, etc. Real-time insights into how people think and experience can tell the mayor what to do at a neighborhood level to better respond to the residents’ needs. But this data doesn’t currently exist. 

Introducing Atlanta POV 

To collect and share this missing data, we at Neighborhood Nexus partnered with Atlanta Civic Circle (ACC), a local nonprofit civic journalism platform, to launch the Atlanta POV regional panel survey. This initiative captures the voices of Metro Atlanta residents and better understands their priorities, opinions, and values (POV). It fills the significant gap in our understanding of Metro Atlanta's diverse communities through monthly pulse surveys and focus groups. This new endeavor aligns with the overall mission of Neighborhood Nexus to provide data, tools, and expertise as a catalyst to create more equitable opportunity for all of the region’s residents.

The insights collected are then delivered to our local civic and government leaders in written reports and presentations, showcasing the data collected and other related indicators to help inform decision-making. 

The ultimate goal of the data collected through these surveys is to advance our partners’ missions by building their capacity to make data-informed decisions and address inequities in Atlanta and Georgia. 

"This initiative is central to developing effective programming and improving what we are doing now. By understanding the community's perspective on the issues we work with, we can better adapt the content of the trainings, their format, and who is being contacted." - Teresa Raetz, Chief Operating Officer of Gwinnett Coalition. 

Teresa Raetz believes that the data collected by POV will also help educate their staff about their biases and break down the assumptions they can make as service providers. She adds, “We want to know what barriers to usability of our resources and other services available for communities are.” 

Building a culture of data-informed decision-making across Georgia’s social impact sector 

The capacity to understand communities’ views on different issues is critical, especially at a time when the exponentially growing data found online is often more overwhelming than insightful. This, paired with the quick turnaround of the surveys, will allow leaders to respond in real-time to challenges that may affect communities differently, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and quickly adjust programs and services based on the residents’ feedback.  

Organizations like the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students (GEEARS), which supports high-quality early learning and healthy development for children from birth to five, can use POV data to inform elected leaders about the community’s priorities and advocate for community-centered policies. These data also allow GEEARS to expand the reach of their programs by better understanding what access to quality learning opportunities really means to residents beyond traditional supply and demand measures in areas where they haven’t been able to provide resources for child educational development yet.  

This way, GEEARS will leverage community voice data to add more color to their storytelling when engaging multiple stakeholders, like board members, advisory councils, and funders—all key to moving Atlanta forward. For Hanah Goldberg, Director of Research and Policy at GEEARS, POV data will become critical in connecting the dots across policy priorities. This way, the organization’s advocacy efforts can be improved thanks to a clear understanding of the challenges that families are facing, their experiences, and the priorities they will have for elected leaders to address. 

Gwinnett Coalition, a nonprofit organization advancing the health and well-being of residents of Georgia’s second largest and most diverse county, can use POV to improve their Resilient Gwinnett program by understanding how culturally diverse communities experience and seek resources for childhood trauma. This will provide the information necessary to design more tailored strategies and programming that respond to the values and address the stigmas identified with the survey and focus groups. 

Learnings from previous projects 

The idea for the Atlanta POV emerged while we were working on the Metro Atlanta Racial Equity Atlas (MAREA) with the Partnership for Southern Equity (PSE) in 2022. MAREA was intended as a tool for communities to better understand and communicate issues related to inequities affecting their quality of life. However, like many data tools, the limited data available about communities’ experiences narrowed the platform’s capacity to accurately showcase the complexity of the problem. 

PSE validated the need to collect and understand asset data and move away from the deficit-focused approach in which most traditional data is framed. However, new, more innovative ways to collect information about communities, like Atlanta POV, are necessary for this. 

Atlanta POV also builds on the learnings of the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Metro Atlanta Speaks Survey (MAS). MAS is an annual snapshot of residents’ views on various critical issues such as transportation, housing, and workforce for ARC's 11-county region. MAS has been crucial to understanding the region’s top concerns and views on specific topics every year, but its data and insights are bound to a mostly fixed set of questions collected once per year. 

A bold vision for impact 

As we scale the initiative, we’re rolling out pulse surveys to test the data collection platform and engaging partners to recruit participants. For example, in April, Atlanta POV asked residents about the most important issues when thinking about who to vote for. This helped the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) and Atlanta Civic Circle (ACC) prepare their candidate questionnaire and guided their reporting on the 2024 election.  

In June, Atlanta POV is asking about summer childcare and the related needs of Atlanta families, whether they are being met, and how they are impacting their budget. The insights gained from this survey will be shared with decision-makers to better inform local funding, policy, and program decisions. 

At a time when data is only getting bigger, faster, exceedingly complex, and noisier, we want to ensure Neighborhood Nexus stays close to the organizations and people we serve. Our current priority is to engage partners and recruit more participants to continue collecting community voice as actionable data. 

As we shift our focus to more human-centered and actionable local data with Atlanta POV, we’re also evolving as an organization. Atlanta POV is the result of over a decade of listening to social sector leaders and communities across the state asking for reliable, real-time information to make tough policy, program, and funding decisions.