Helping funders better understand their community

The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund was established in 2017 to strengthen organizations and people working to build a local news and information ecosystem in North Carolina. In addition to grantmaking, the Fund has established the North Carolina Local News Workshop housed within Elon’s School of Communications. Both operations support the state’s civic infrastructure.

Recently, the Fund asked Carolina Demography to create an interactive map synthesizing demographic and economic characteristics of their grant recipients so that they could better understand how to prioritize future funding.

Approach

NC Local News Lab Fund wanted to better understand the characteristics of communities where their existing North Carolina grant recipients worked as well as characteristics of communities that they hoped to serve in the future. They asked us to provide them with an easy way to compare and view information.

We cleaned, curated, and then integrated a variety of datasets from various sources including data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s population estimates, social and economic characteristics from the 5-Year American Community Survey, population projections from the NC Office of State Budget and Management, precinct voting statistics from NC State Board of Elections, voter registration data from NC SBOE, and Democracy Fund data on existing grantees.

We provided the Fund with both an Excel file of top-level statistics as well as an interactive Tableau map to facilitate their internal understanding of their current and future grant recipients in North Carolina.

Impact

Our material helped the NC Local News Lab Fund better understand and then prioritize their funding to better serve existing and future grant recipients in North Carolina.