2012 Scorecard by the Numbers
By Sean Luechtefeld on 02/02/2012 @ 02:00 PM
For the past couple days, we’ve been offering an in-depth look at the different products we released on Tuesday, including the Assets & Opportunity Network homepage and the special report, A Portrait of Financial Insecurity and Policies to Rebuild Financial Security in America.
Today, I want to walk you through the Scorecard data on the Assets & Opportunity website. As we’ve mentioned, the data has been collected for all 50 states and the District of Columbia and measures state performance across 101 measures in five different issue areas. That’s a lot of data, but luckily the Policy and Research teams have been hard at work to deliver this data in the most easy-to-use format possible.
When you first navigate to scorecard.cfed.org, you’ll see a map of the United States (above). Each state (and let’s not forget DC) is shaded, with darker orange colors indicating residents doing well in terms of financial security and grey colors indicating high levels of work needing to be done to combat asset poverty. You can click on any of these states to retrieve data. Since it’s Groundhog Day, let’s pick Pennsylvania as an example to honor Punxsutawney Phil.
When you click on PA, you’ll see their grade in each of the five major areas. So, you can see that the Keystone State earns an ‘A’ in health care, a ‘C’ in education and so forth. From there, you can also click on ‘View All State Data.’ That will take you to a screen that looks like this:
At the top of the page, you’ll notice some policy recommendations that the State of Pennsylvania should consider to help improve their scores across the five major issue areas. Most of these are relatively low-cost, both financially and politically, but would make a significant difference in the lives of Pennsylvanians. Then, below those recommendations, you’ll find six different tabs. The first five are for state-level data and the different measures within each; this is the highly specific information that helps paint a robust picture of how well PA is fighting asset poverty. Each of those measures is also clickable. So, if you click on ‘Asset Poverty by Gender,’ for example, you can see how Pennsylvania compares to the other states.
Finally, clicking on the right-hand tab on the page above will take you to a screen where you can create a customized PDF of the data found on the Scorecard website. Let’s imagine you had to testify in front of the state legislature in support of microenterprise development. You could select the data you want and create a handout that could accompany your testimony. There are literally thousands of different data combinations you can create with this tool, so I hope you’ll use it to promote the assets agenda in your community.
In all, we’ve put a lot of time into making the Scorecard data as useful as possible to maximize its impact in the assets and opportunity field. So, I hope you’ll play around with it when you’ve got the chance and use the Comments below to leave your feedback.
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