Greater Portland Pulse: an Evolution

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1 Greater Portland Pulse: an Evolution Measuring and Monitoring Community Outcomes portlandpulse.org Meg Merrick, Ph. D. Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies Portland State University merrickmpdx.edu

2 Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies Serves a bi-state 6-county region, more than 50 municipalities Convenes regional partners Curates credible information Conducts objective policy research to stimulate dialogue and action that address critical regional issues Member of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership

3 Regional Indicators: an evolution Metropolitan Briefing Book 1997 to 2007 Partnership with Coalition for a Livable Future (Regional Equity Atlas 1.0) Creation of Greater Portland Pulse to 2014 Regional Equity Atlas 2.0 online mapping tool 2011 to 2015 Greater Portland Pulse to present Neighborhood Pulse under development Hardcopy book Regional geographies Online tool Neighborhood level geographies

4 Measuring Results, Inspiring Action GPP s early days: Consensus-based regional outcomes Consensus-based regional indicators Key players: Metro, PSU s Institute for Sustainable Solutions, Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies

5 GPP s early days: Outcomes, Indicators, and Data Nine outcome categories Indicators limited to 6-8 per category Created a relational database infrastructure to provide greater efficiency and quality control for the data Secondary data only Maintained 111 variables for 64 indicators in nine outcome categories in real time Maintained the Weave visualization web interface that provides interactive maps, graphs, and charts to highlight trends Measuring Results, Inspiring Action

6 Outreach to the Community

7 Project Costs Original Project 16% 18% 15% 24% 44% Outreach and Training Data Database Infrastructure Data Visualization Overhead and Administration Projected Annual Budget Actual Annual Budget Data and Project Infrastructure $250,000 $175,000 Data and Dialogue $550,000 Fiscal realities require an assessment, simplification, re-design Current Project MSA, county, and school district geographies only High Charts data visualization, no maps Less customization Maintained primarily by graduate students Simpler web design

8 Lessons Learned: The Challenge of Funding Generalized Indicators Projects As subscription-based funding model that was built on the assumption that major public engagement processes that built consensus around the desired outcomes and the indicators would produce adequate financial support proved false. The consensus-based outcomes lacked enough specificity for use of local and even region government. The indicators were therefore not targeted enough Serving all masters is very expensive. There is power in simplicity and power in the specific but funding models may be different. There is also confusion about the meaning of and distinction between indicators and performance measures.

9 Lessons Learned: Measures of Equity Must Be Explicit Consensus requirement in a political context produced the immersion of equity values into the desired outcomes but not considered an outcome of its own and, therefore invisible to most users. Indicators, whenever possible, were disaggregated by race and ethnicity. Actionable equity measures must be at the neighborhood level but GPP measures were/are generally unreliable at that level of geography. The new streamlined approach includes equity as a desired regional outcome and indicator topic.

10 IMS Indicator Projects Today: Balancing Time and Space Greater Portland Pulse (Prioritizes change over time - Counties and MSA geographies only) portlandpulse.org A process of coming to consensus about a set of regional outcomes Learning process: trade-offs between temporal and spatial resolution; simplicity vs. complexity Budget realities

11 Neighborhood Profiles Neighborhood Mapping Tool Portland 21: Our Changing Region Storytelling Prioritizes geography over time Under development Will roll out over time as funding becomes available

12 Meg Merrick, Ph.D. Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies Portland State University portlandpulse.org