Back in January, the Community Commons team hosted two topic-focused webinars to help our members better understand some of our more advanced tools. If you missed them or want to learn more, we’ve got links to the webinars below and some additional resources:
Creating a Custom Area for Your CHNA Report
Are you working in a community that’s much smaller than the county it’s in? Or maybe you have a service area that crosses state lines? These are just a few reasons to use our custom area tool. Here’s a few more:
- You want to include multiple cities or zip codes, but not an entire county;
- You want to include a combination of a county and an adjacent city;
- You want to segment a portion of a county or city; or
- You want to include non-adjacent areas.
Defining a custom area allows you to run a CHNA report outside of the parameters of the typical county-level report. Although useful, county-level reports may be to broad to to narrow for you to really make solid assumptions about the health of your community. It may also make it very hard to set priorities. The custom area tool uses our small area estimate methodology to interpret data at a smaller geography, making the CHNA report output more meaningful, and more customized, for your community or service area.
Take a few minutes to watch the webinar below to learn more about the uses and functions of our custom area tool.
What’s Your Query?
Before diving into the question, “what’s your query?” Let’s first ask, “what is a query?” And “why should I use query tools?”
A data query, in technical terms, is a request for information from a database. What does that mean in non-technical terms? Let’s explore an example to learn:
Let’s say you’re looking at the data set “Students Eligible for Free and Reduced Price Lunch.” There’s a series of attributes, or information that makes up the data set, that you can query. For example, within the data set “Students Eligible for Free and Reduced Price Lunch” there’s lots of information behind the scenes. Some of the attributes include:
- School locations and type of school (is it a grade school, junior high school, or vocational school?);
- School district;
- Total number of students in the school;
- The total number of students eligible for free and reduced price lunch;
- The percent of the total number of student eligible for for free and reduced price lunch;
- Total number of students eligible for free lunch only and;
- Total number of students eligible for reduced price lunch only.
All of the attributes are the types of information you can query. Why would you want to query this information? Here are few examples:
- You want to view only schools within a certain school district;
- You want to view only schools with a student population less than 500 or;
- You want to view only schools where the total number of students eligible for free lunch only is greater than 80%.
Other reasons to use the query tool include:
- The map legend isn’t specific enough for your needs;
- You need to find something with a specific name or;
- You want to download a list of data that meet specific criteria.
To learn how to use the query tool and to see more examples, watch the webinar recording below.
Have questions about these tools or something we said in the webinar? Send us a note – we’re happy to help!
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