Defend your data
The steps you need when using data to contend with power
Our main topic this month is critical: the importance of “defending your data” when you are using data to contend with power. There are so many ways to dismiss and undermine arguments that rely on data, and those in power know it. We wrote a short blog post featured on Tableau’s website, which outlines 5 steps that you can use to neutralize these criticisms.
This is a bit breezier edition with some short thoughts and updates from us and one ask – help us find the perfect person or team to spruce up our website!
Before we get started, welcome to all the new subscribers and thank you to everyone who has helped share our newsletter – thanks to you all we recently passed 1,000 subscribers! (The Civic Pulse is free and you can always subscribe or unsubscribe from this monthly-ish newsletter, featuring a mix of editorial content and the latest updates from our work.) Help us keep growing and share the newsletter!
In this issue you’ll find:
Defending your data
A new resource for data advocates from Tableau
Get mad, but get organized
Musical interlude
Help us get help!
Our link roundup
As always, thank you for reading. On to the topics.
Defending your data
At Civilytics, we’ve seen firsthand the higher burden advocates face when seeking to use data to make change. We encountered this ourselves, when we broke the news about the unequal allocation of fiscal stabilization funds across states. That’s why we were excited to partner with the Tableau Foundation on creating a 5-step guide to #defendyourdata.
This guide, created through Civilytics’ work for the Tableau Racial Equity Data Hub, describes 5 steps to defend your data analysis from the most common threats to credibility:
Choose the best data and use it to establish your credibility
Prepare the data with care
Build trust through transparency
Frame your analysis
Anticipate and address the audience’s questions
For each step, the guide includes an example of a recent visualization showing the step in action.
The guide was inspired in part by Lee Staples’ Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing. Staples identified 7 strategies that are used to resist change: deflecting, delaying, deceiving, dividing, denying, discrediting, and destroying. He wrote that to succeed in your campaign for change:
“[Your organization]… can take a number of steps to overcome efforts to discredit its campaigns. Obviously, its facts and figures should be accurate. Challenges can be expected, especially when the information is damning. The best defense will rest on solid research methodology and a good media strategy to carry your message to the general public.”
The guide’s five steps provide strategies to defend your data, analysis decisions, and conclusions and carry your message forward to change the status quo. We hope you’ll check it out!
Introducing the Data Advocacy Explorer
We also wanted to share a new resource from Tableau, the Data Advocacy Explorer.
This tool was designed to assist small and medium-sized nonprofits, foundation grantees, organizations and individuals engaged in community and systems advocacy who have challenges finding, accessing, and using data in their advocacy efforts.
It highlights the ART2 of data storytelling, walking through an Approach, Resources, Tools & Training (ART2) to help groups add more effective, persuasive data and visualizations to their advocacy efforts.
If you work or volunteer for a community organization that uses Tableau, or that is simply interested in additional ideas for data storytelling, check out the Data Advocacy Explorer for guidance on
How to Approach a data advocacy project
Links to Tableau Resources covering different approaches
And free or low-cost Tools and Training
Get mad, but get organized
It is a volatile time. The Dobbs ruling by the Supreme Court feels horrifying and irreversible. The Biden administration forgiving $10,000 (and potentially much more) in student loan debt and rewriting the rules for repayment felt like a huge relief. It can be hard to feel grounded and not at the whims of greater forces.
But two things have kept coming back to me:
Where is the Equal Rights Amendment? Virginia ratified it and it should be settled and enshrined as Amendment 28. But it isn’t. Lyz Lenz has the fascinating scoop on what it would mean to enshrine equal rights for women in the Constitution.
How can we build power in the face of massive inequality? When you aren’t a rich plutocrat, you can’t just directly reach a senator, engineer a court case, or relentlessly fund research to support your views. The rest of us have only one source of power – each other. The process of moving from individual outrage to collective power is called organizing. Since many of us come from the education space, I found this portrait of teachers in Philadelphia organizing for better conditions in their schools to be a really good inside view of what this means in practice.
These things are related! Grassroots organizers created and realized the plan for forgiving student loan debt in less than two decades. They won. We know we can win together.
And winning feels good!
Musical interlude
Music is a big part of my life, so Hannah suggested we add a newsletter section featuring music!
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much music influenced my views on abortion and women’s rights – I learned about the National Organization for Women from grunge band endorsements when I was a teenager. Music is powerful – especially at a certain age.
Abortion on television, especially network television, is rare and misrepresentative. In music, the narratives are more personal and diverse.
With that in mind, I give you “Pennsylvania Is…” by Everclear.1 It is a very grunge-y lo-fi extremely 90s song, but for whatever its flaws, it paints a vivid picture of why access to abortion matters and which side the band is on. The line “hey man do you want a placemat or a wife?” stuck with me for a long time.
Help us spruce up our homepage
I’m proud of the work we’ve done to bootstrap our own homepage at Civilytics, but the time has come to get some professional outside help. Our responsibilities are both growing and our time to care, maintain, and improve the website is shrinking. So we are looking for someone who can help us take our website to the next level.
If you know any WordPress consultants who would be interested in this kind of work, please send along this description to them!
Help our growing data science firm improve the way we communicate our findings and engage with our audience. We have been self-managing our WordPress site (www.civilytics.com) for 18 months now and it is time for an update and polish. If you are a designer who is familiar with the WordPress platform, we’d love your help taking our website to the next level.
We have a strong existing brand identity and a lot of good content, but we are finding it hard to stay consistent and to make our site consistently have the look we want. We need help making good choices for some lesser used design elements, reviewing our existing design choices, and implementing better consistency.
We also need some quality of life updates to our website including a way to capture visitors’ emails and some ways to consistently link readers to relevant content within the site.
If you want to help a value driven social science company better communicate its unique perspective to a wide set of audiences, let us know.
Link roundup
What kills people in our community says a lot more about us than we realize (part 1 and part 2)
We are learning so much about the ways long-term exposure to trauma, stress, poverty, and environmental pollution can shorten our lifespans. This is a great description of much of that growing evidence (the overly simplistic framing of America as “red” or “blue” aside).
Getting and staying organized features prominently in this story about community members imploring their city to think about how best to use a limited resource like urban greenspace.
Ending mass incarceration means ending an industry and we need a plan for that
This article paints a portrait of how the decision to close a prison impacts people inside the prison and the town around the prison. Politicians, foundations, and local leaders need to start getting specific about how we can make a just transition away from prisons and toward strong, resilient communities.
It has been hot lately, and really hot in Phoenix
I’ve never been to Phoenix but hope to visit one day and am very familiar with the city’s budget. More than most communities, Phoenix is investing in strategies to abate the impact of extreme heat but the amount of investment doesn’t come close to meeting the growing need.
Small towns can be held absolutely hostage by their own police, even in “blue states”
Our jaws hit the floor about 8 times reading this article and learning about the scale, longevity, brutality, and pettiness on display in the Stoughton Police Department just up the road from us. Not a read for the faint of heart.
If you read one more thing about Uvalde or are writing something about Uvalde – read this first
This is how to cover policing in the U.S. With context. With fact-checking and skepticism about the claims made by the police and the DA. Uvalde wasn’t a failure of one police department but rather dozens that rushed to respond and then just didn’t.
If your community is facing rising housing prices and concerns about housing equity, then it should consider a community land trust or community-owned housing. Land trusts have along history in our communities – it is time for a resurgence.
As always, thank you for reading!
Jared
I’m aware “Brick” by Ben Folds Five may have been a better choice from the same era. However, the lyrics weren’t blunt enough for me as a teenager so it went over my head. The Everclear song’s bluntness got through and stuck with me.