Virginia Community Engagement Index Dashboards
About the Office of Data Governance and Analytics (ODGA)
The ODGA partners with Commonwealth agencies and public institutions to maximize the value of Commonwealth data through strategic governance, secure and appropriate data sharing, and enterprise analytics services informing actionable intelligence. The office is led by the Chief Data Officer for the Commonwealth of Virginia and is made up of a team full of talented professionals.
What prompted the collaboration of the Department of Social Services with the ODGA?
The DSS has a division called Serve Virginia (https://www.dss.virginia.gov/community/servevirginia/index.cgi) who launched a study, the Virginia Community Engagement Index (VCEI), to better understand volunteerism and civic action in Virginia (https://servevirginia.org/why-serve/). This study was intended to provide insights into what challenges Virginians believe their communities are facing, assess where Virginians think action should be taken, and to understand what motivates Virginians to get involved in tackling these challenges. 6,393 Virginians were surveyed to develop these key insights. The DSS engaged the ODGA to present these survey results in a visually compelling dashboard that will be available to the public to view. The dashboard breaks down some of the survey by question (Exhibit A) and the question can be further broken down by variables such as region, race, and gender (Exhibit B). Relevant links to the VCEI report are included as well as a summary of the findings (Exhibit B). VCEI will now be able to provide this dashboard to organizations relying on volunteers, enhancing their ability to tailor volunteer opportunities and boost engagement. The public Power BI dashboard can be seen here: https://servevirginia.org/why-serve/
Feedback
The Serve Virginia team explained that the team was aware of the value the Virginia Community Engagement Index data had, but the team did not have the bandwidth to learn a new platform such as Power BI. This left the option to use a third-party vendor, which would have been a time consuming and expensive undertaking, with quotes in the ballpark of $45,000. The Serve Virginia team also mentioned the benefit of having the ODGA team readily available to answer quick questions, as opposed to the timely and costly prospect of paying a vendor for ad hoc questions or reporting. The dashboard also saved the team time. Despite being a public dashboard, the team emphasized its value for the ability to use it internally to quickly pull up relevant statistics for leadership, which previously would have needed to be dug up through static reports, and in some cases, would have required the aforementioned timely and expensive ad hoc reporting from a third-party vendor. The Serve Virginia team explained that presenting the dashboards to organizations in Virginia will allow them to secure partnerships for other projects and programs that they are promoting, therefore extending the reach of their office to better meet the need of Virginians.