Lessons Learned
Keep up with our latest demographic insights
Demographic data is useful to a wide variety of organizations, ranging from nonprofits to businesses to government. Knowing the statistical characteristics of a population is key to future planning, making public policy decisions, and for organizations to know how to best reach and serve their intended audience(s). Through my work at Carolina Demography, I have become interested in how different industries use demographic data in their daily work. I recently had the pleasure of getting…
A few months ago, Carolina Demography's director, Rebecca Tippett, asked me to develop 100 detailed one-pager reports with over 120 data fields – one for each county in North Carolina. As a graphic designer, coding in a brand-new language seemed overwhelming, but the idea of entering 120 data fields on each page would have been time-consuming, opened up the possibility of transcription errors, and required hours of copyediting. So I spent the next few weeks…
I visited Minneapolis last month to attend the data journalism conference SRCCON (pronounced “source con”). SRCCON hosts conversations and workshops for people who work on data teams – particularly those in newsrooms. While Carolina Demography does not produce traditional news, we do communicate data findings to the public on a regular basis.I was excited to learn more about how other teams work – and wanted to share a few things I learned at the conference.