Reliable, relevant data is foundational for meaningful community decision-making and storytelling. Our latest update from the ACS is a part of our promise to provide more people with accurate and granular data, saving them from the long and bump road of data processing.
On December 10th--the Census Bureau released the latest data from the leading source of population statistics for communities across the country: the American Community Survey (ACS). In just 3 business days, the mySidewalk data team was able to process and update over 500 million data values into our Data Library.
What does that mean for you? As of the morning of December 15th, we've updated all ACS data values and visualizations in mySidewalk with the latest 5-year estimates. The 2014-2018 estimates were replaced with the new values and are available for mySidewalk users to download, visualize, and publish quickly and easily.
The data team prepared for weeks to ensure our partners had quick and ready-to-use access to the most current data. We believe change can happen when people have good information to guide them, and using detailed, relevant data is step one. The ACS is an important resource in our Data Library, and keeping the data up-to-date is a part of our commitment to enabling more people to use the most reliable, unified community data that's available.
mySidewalk users have access to the latest set of precise demographics available in their communities, with all existing visualizations already up-to-date.
As the hallmark yearly data release from the US Census Bureau, the ACS 5-year estimates are a critical resource that drives local decisions, conversations, and billions of dollars in funding. Every year millions of people participate in the ACS, and the Census Bureau pools the most recent 5 years of data to represent average characteristics of a community over time. This year's release covers data collected from 2015-2019, which we've used to replace the previous 5-year estimates (2014-2018).
Still --even good data can't do anything by itself. Our visualization and publishing platform is designed to take data to its full potential by making it simple for anyone to get the information they need, find insight within, and make a difference.
Here's all you need to know to get started with the latest release:
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Updating half a billion data values is a lot of work to get done in a few days. Thankfully, the mySidewalk data team put in the prep work and dedicated time to ensuring the update occurred without disturbance to mySidewalk users. To make it all happen, the team...
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We make a deliberate effort to build a library that connects people and communities to the best data that's available to help achieve their goals.
To enable quick and useful data updates like this, we keep a system of metadata (information about data) to link our Data Library together, often resulting in more metadata than each individual source (which comes in handy when they make an error). To be effective in this system, it's also important for data to meet selection criteria such as availability (can I use this for my geography?), reliability (how precise and current is it?), relevancy (is this useful to my community and goals?).
Using the ACS as an example, we maintain the latest 5-year estimates because it provides communities small and large with detailed, reliable data on topics important for many community disciplines.
We can highlight some of these differences even more when comparing the ACS 5-year estimates to the 1-year estimates, which only contains data from a single year and is less widely available.
| 5-Year | 1-Year | |
| Data Collection Period | 60 Months | 12 months |
| Smallest Geography | Block Group | Data for areas with a population over 65,000 |
| Reliability & Recency | Larger sample size, but with less current data. | Smaller sample size, but with more current data. |
| Best Used When... |
You want granular information/geographies, and data precision is more important than recency. |
You're focusing only on areas with large populations and the need for the most recent data is more important than precision. |
Source: US Census Bureau. For more info on ACS data in mySidewalk, visit our help article here.
Of course, the best impacts of reliable data are made when in the hands of people who use it to make a difference. Here's how a few of our partners have used ACS data with mySidewalk:
We update the ACS data in our platform every year, but the process of gathering and unifying data is the same approach we make to every source we maintain on a weekly basis. We put in this work to maintain the data because we believe your time is better spent applying for that grant your project needs, prioritizing needs in your community, or engaging your audience to make change.
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