Community Needs Assessment FAQ
To create a multi-county report you must have a paid SparkMap Subscription. If creating multi-county reports is the extent of your needs, we recommend our Intro SparkMap Subscription. It provides 80 core indicators and the ability to select as many counties as you’d like for your report.
If you would like access to additional indicators and geography levels, we recommend the Pro and Premium Subscriptions. To see which indicators are available at each level, check out our indicator List.
Access to indicators is determined by subscription level. Free and Intro Subscribers have access to approximately 80+ indicators. Pro Subscribers access approximately 150+ indicators. Premium Subscribers access all 300+ indicators. To see which indicators are available at your SparkMap Subscription level, check out our Indicator List.
Our Community Needs Assessment is always free for single county reports, but you can unlock additional features with a paid subscription. The Intro Subscription allows for multi-county selection, the Pro Subscription grants access to approximately 100 additional indicators, and the Premium Subscription grants access to 100 more indicators, plus the Draw My Area Tool, Pick From Map Tool, and Zip Code-level data (Premium Annual only). For a side-by-side comparison of all subscription levels, check out our comparison chart.
The team at SparkMap is constantly working to ensure you have access to the most recent data. Reports saved to your profile are automatically updated with the most recent data available. If you’d like access to the original data, we recommend saving a copy of your report in PDF format. To see a list of recent dataset updates and revisions, check out the Data News page.
SparkMap acquires and analyzes data from more than 100 secondary sources. Secondary sources are typically very reliable and are supported by government agencies. For example, a large portion of our data comes to us from the United States Census Bureau. Other sources include agencies like the United States Department of Agriculture, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance Survey, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the United States Geological Survey.
Data are only as reliable as the source! SparkMap acquires and analyzes data from more than 100 secondary sources. Our secondary sources are typically very reliable and are supported by government agencies. We always provide data source descriptions in the Community Needs Assessment, as well as links back to the original source. Please utilize these to learn more about your data’s collection timeline, collection methods, and more.
Data are updated as often as they become available. For example, the American Community Survey (ACS) releases five-year estimates every year, so we update ACS indicators once per year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes unemployment data monthly, so we update unemployment monthly. Every SparkMap indicator and map layer has a corresponding release cycle, and we work to ensure that SparkMap is always equipped with the most recent data. If you find an indicator that you believe is out of date, please contact us at sparkmap@missouri.edu.
SparkMap has a “Data News” section that provides data updates, alerts about new data, data corrections and more. Check out Data News.