For leaders working to advance upward mobility in their communities, it’s critical to be clear about which decisions data can inform and to ensure the data they’re collecting are aligned to those decisions. And although we’re surrounded by dashboards, reports, and research, leaders still face a fundamental challenge: How do you take numbers, stories, and interview insights and translate them into meaningful, actionable decisions?

The Upward Mobility Initiative supports leaders undertaking this work through data, tools, and coaching designed to meet communities where they are. Using data to inform priorities and decisions is rarely a simple or one-time exercise; it’s a significant, iterative undertaking that requires sustained attention, collaboration, and adaptation. At its core, data-driven decisionmaking is about turning information into insight, and insight into action.

Below, we outline six actions that draw from Upward Mobility Initiative resources that can help local leaders begin or refine their approach toward data-driven decisionmaking. Though some communities can implement these actions , in many cases, they’ll need to revisit steps as new information becomes available and local conditions evolve.

Develop a community vision. A community vision statement is a short, aspirational description of what outcomes you are working toward—the “why” behind your initiative. It guides priorities, research questions, and strategies and can evolve over time. For example, in 2022, Upward Mobility Cohort member, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, created the following community vision statement as part of its work: “Philadelphia strives to be a city where every resident is healthy, is safe, and has economic prosperity and a good quality of life. We aim to be an equitable city that eliminates the barriers to health, safety, and connectedness that exist based on race and ethnicity, disability status, age, and gender identity.”

Understand current conditions. The Upward Mobility Framework offers Paired with additional local data, the metrics can help you gain a comprehensive picture of the conditions that enable or hinder mobility in your community across a range of domains. You can use the mobility metrics to compare your community’s performance with peer cities, national medians, and places with notably high or low values to better understand the scale of a mobility challenge. The metrics also help highlight how predictors can be mutually reinforcing or interconnected. For example, within the domain of education, it could be revealing to analyze the metric for digital access (the share of households with a computer and broadband internet at home) alongside the metric for college preparation for college (the share of 19- and 20-year-olds with a high school degree). And by incorporating a metric of housing stability (share of public-school children who are ever homeless during the school year), you could gain further insights into how neighborhood conditions affect education. To get started, explore your community’s data in the Upward Mobility Data Dashboard.

Identify and contextualize local challenges. With a broad community vision and understanding of local conditions, consider areas of strength you can build on as well as specific challenges impeding progress toward that vision. For areas of strength, you can take an appreciative inquiry approach to discover what’s working well, understand why it’s working well, and explore questions around how to amplify it: How did we develop these strengths? What lessons have we learned that we can apply to other issues? And more than stating the challenge, it’s important to do preliminary qualitative or community-engaged research to contextualize it in specific local histories. Some prompts to guide this work include: What narratives have been lifted by the community about the challenge? Is the problem embedded in institutions, if so, which? What has already been done to attempt to address the challenge? Is it working? For example, many cities struggle with poor outcomes at the intersection of housing and health—but a community’s answers to these prompts provide essential nuance that can guide you toward more-specific research questions and solutions.

Determine research questions. Once challenges are clear, you can move to develop focused research questions. Good research questions can have a range of objectives—some work to answer gaps in knowledge, others stand to affirm or counter assumptions, and some are targeted to gain insights into what information specific stakeholder groups may need. Though you will likely develop a web of questions throughout your work, keep your questions focused and actionable, iterating to sharpen your analysis. Select an element of your local challenge and zero in. For example, if your local challenge is housing stability, you might choose to explore eviction in your research.

Identify the data you need. Consider what information you need to answer your question. To answer a research question about who is experiencing eviction and at what rates, you could start by gathering disaggregated data—such as eviction rates by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood. And gathering the data to answer that first question will lead to more. You may now ask: Why is a group vulnerable to eviction? This could lead you to look for data like housing cost burden, access to living-wage jobs, and wealth disparities. Leaning into discovery through data opens room to consider these challenges in new ways and bring in new perspectives. Supplement national metrics from tools like the Upward Mobility Data Dashboard with local sources, open data portals, and qualitative insights (including those from community engagement). Combining these approaches helps reveal inequities, track changes over time, and guide targeted solutions.

Develop strategic priorities. These insights can guide how your team sets strategic priorities. Through data analysis, you can identify patterns that allow you to craft interventions that move beyond the vague (build affordable housing) toward targeted solutions (focusing affordable housing for a specific income level in a specific neighborhood). Effective strategies work to address shortcomings in systems or structures and often will cut across several policy domains to maximize impact. When developing your strategic priorities, it can be helpful to think about how to balance quick wins that alleviate immediate needs and longer-term aspirations of structural change. Resources like the Results for America Economic Mobility Catalog offer a range of evidence-based strategies and information about how communities have implemented them and may be a good starting place for your planning.

For real-world examples of this process, visit the Mobility Action Learning Network page, specifically the summaries in the “Using Data for Decisionmaking” track. You can download the checklist below and use it to guide your work and access relevant resources at each step. 

Checklist: Using data to inform strategic priorities