Overview

We partnered with a nonprofit to build a public-facing data platform that brings together public data and community voice. The goal was to help policymakers, advocates, and local leaders better understand the opportunities and challenges facing different regions and populations. By translating complex information into clear, accessible insights, the platform supports more informed, human-centered decision-making grounded in both data and real-world perspectives.

The Challenge

Public health and behavioral health systems often rely on lagging, aggregate indicators that limit local context and nuance. While data is widely available, it can be difficult to understand what is driving outcomes across regions, interpret how community experiences align with available statistics, and identify where targeted interventions can have the greatest impact.

The organization needed a way to combine trusted quantitative data with qualitative community insights at scale, and to make that information accessible to a broad, non-technical audience.

Our Approach

We worked in close partnership with leadership, research, and product teams to design a platform that balanced rigor, accessibility, and responsible data use.

Our work included:

• Integrated data foundation: Bringing together survey results, interviews, and focus group findings with validated public datasets in a shared, cloud-based system.

• Clear data governance: Establishing shared definitions and governance practices across partners to support data quality, consistency, and ethical use.

• Public, user-friendly tools: Developing an external-facing platform with interactive dashboards and a natural-language AI interface that allows users to explore questions in plain language.

Results & Impact

• Richer understanding: Users can explore quantitative indicators alongside community perspectives in one place.

• More informed action: Policymakers and advocates can identify patterns, gaps, and opportunities that are often missed by aggregate metrics alone.

• Broader access: Non-technical users can engage meaningfully with complex data without specialized training.

• Built for growth: The platform can expand to include additional datasets, communities, and future use cases.