How to Use the Community Assessment

Learn step-by-step how to use the Community Assessment. Watch the video below, or follow the written tutorial.

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The Video and Written Tutorial Cover

How to Select Your Desired Location
How to Select and Learn About Indicators
How Generate, Explore, and Download Your Assessment

1. How to Select Your Desired Location

I. After opening the Assessment, click to select your state of interest (Figure 1).

Only want to assess data at the state level? Then you’ve completed Step 1. Click the “Data Indicators” button at the bottom right corner of the page to proceed to the next step.
Interested in county-level data? Remain on the first page. A list of counties will populate once you select your state.

II. When the list of counties populates, click to select your county of interest (Figure 2). Note that you can select multiple counties with a paid subscription.

III. Click the “Data Indicators” button at the bottom right corner of the page to proceed to the next step.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Note: The demonstration is for one County, but you can select more than one with an Intro, Pro, or Premium subscription. Learn more here.

2. How to Select and Learn About Indicators

I. You should now see a list of data indicator categories, including Demographics, Environment, and Education. Click each category to view a drop-down list of relevant data indicators (Figure 3).

You can learn more about each data indicator by clicking the (i) button beside it (Figure 4).

II. Select your data indicators of interest.

To include all available data in your Assessment, click the “select all indicators” checkbox at the top of the page.
To include all available data in a particular category (i.e. “Demographics”), click the checkbox beside the category name.
To only include hand-picked data indicators, manually select your desired indicators.

III. Once you have selected the indicators you wish to include, click the “Reports” button at the bottom right corner of the page to continue to your completed Assessment.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

3. How to Generate, Explore, and Download Your Assessment

I. You should now be viewing your completed report. The report provides stem sentences and data tables, and visualizations for every data Indicator you selected in Step 2 (Figure 5).

You will also see explanations and visualizations for “breakout data.” Breakout data refers to significant sub-categories of data within an indicator. For example, when you select the indicator “Total Population,” your report will provide breakout data on Total Population by Age, Total Population by Gender, and Total Population by Race and Ethnicity.
Want to view your Assessment without breakout data? Simply click the “Report Options” button at the top of your report and then unclick the box labeled “Show Supplementary Data.”

II. Explore your Assessment

If you want to easily jump to different sections of your report, click the hamburger menu (insert image here) to navigate from one topic to another Figure 6).

Figure 5. Indicator Description and Table

Figure 6 – Menu and Breakout Data

III. Download Your Assessment

You can download your Assessment as a PDF (Figure 7) by clicking the “Download” button at the top right corner of the page. Premium Subscribers can download Assessments as a PDF, Microsoft Word doc, and Microsoft Excel file.

Figure 7 – Download as a PDF

If you need any additional assistance, feel free to chat or email us at sparkmap@missouri.edu