Indy Indicators

Geographic Scope

Subneighborhood, Neighborhood, Municipality, County, Metropolitan, Multi-County, Sub-State Region, State/Province, National

Issue Areas

Arts and Culture, Economy, Education, Employment, Environment, Governance, Health & Wellbeing, Housing, Population, Poverty, Public Safety, Transportation

Description

Indy Indicators is all about measuring and engaging people in the quality of life in Central Indiana. It uses the nickname of the region’s largest city, but it spans the region from Terre Haute to Richmond and from Bloomington to Lafayette to Muncie. It focuses on KEY indicators – those indicators that are deemed by many experts to be the ones that make the difference in a community’s quality of life. It provides key maps that provide a geographic context to the indicators, all the way down to neighborhoods and tract levels.

The Marion County Public Health Department has taken the lead in this endeavor (and has shown its strong commitment by sponsoring what is really a second go at such a website and program of civic engagement). To get this site redesigned and civic engagement firmly implemented, they have chosen to work with three nationally-recognized, award winning research centers at IUPUI which are fully committed to this work.

They learned through their first iteration of such a site that it was critical to keep it simple, keep it fresh, make the measures meaningful, and make visualization of the data the focal point, combining it with comparisons to places anywhere in the state, the Midwest, or the country. Context is needed to make sense of the data.

They also learned that once you give folks some data, they usually want more – so they’ve built a component called Data Central, where that desire for more data (and graphs and maps) can be quenched.

Has Perfomance Measures?

Yes
County health rankings (WISC) and Healthy People 2020

Has CI-PM Integration?

Yes
They are just now creating integration with the Marion County Public Health Department, their primary sponsor.

Project URL

http://indyindicators.iupui.edu

Project Contact:

Carol Rogers
Indiana University, Indiana Business Research Center -
rogersc@indiana.edu
Indianapolis IN USA