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Iowa

A Strong Foundation for Housing

With mySidewalk, the Iowa Finance Authority is leveraging innovative data tools to increase access and use of community data to identify and prioritize the affordable housing, water, and agricultural infrastructure needs across the state.

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The Challenge

Ashley Jared knows the power of a good story.

For years, she and her team had worked to craft impactful data stories. But at the core of forming those narratives was disjointed information.

While program data lived in one place internally, community data had to be downloaded from several sources—all of which needed to be analyzed at various geography levels across the state. 

Ashley’s team needed a way to talk about high-level, state insights and still meet the needs of their stakeholders at a granular level. More than that, Ashley saw the one-off reports done at a community level—all from a different set of indicators and using different methodologies. 

Ashley and the Iowa Finance Authority (IFA) found themselves at a crossroads. 

They had a strong desire to do more than possess data: they wanted data-driven guidance—for an entire state

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The Solution

IFA noticed early on that many of the cities and counties they served were all paying for the same report. The same data and the same format—all with a different place analyzed.

They didn’t believe cities and counties should have to pay for those reports and instead, wanted a way to seamlessly offer that data to their stakeholders.

Crucial to this offering, however, was finding a tool that would offer ease of use and contribute to the understanding of the information, not just the reporting of it.

Once IFA partnered with mySidewalk, their world of decision-making began to change. 

Easy access to data at a state-wide level—and the ability to dig deeper into any local community across 100s of indicators—opened a world of possibilities.

In years past, various communities would manually create individual community reports. These reports took significant investment and offered no way to compare other communities. The data was locked in a PDF, often disconnected from the state, and used different methodologies to forecast housing for future years.

IFA knew their stakeholders’ pain points—more than that, they knew the entire state should be working from an aligned playbook to solve its affordable housing challenges. 

Matt Hauge from the Polk County Housing Trust Fund tried out the tool and could see the value statewide. 

“Tools like this are such an advantage when it comes to explaining some of these complex datasets… in our work, we're trying to pull people along and say, ‘Hey, this housing data says something significant.’ Anything to make this information easier for people to understand themselves is really valuable.”
Matt Hauge

Polk County Housing Trust Fund

By aligning KPIs across housing, employment opportunities and other quality-of-life indicators, IFA created an easy to use snapshot for local leaders. In the first three months, nearly 2,000 dashboards were downloaded across the state.

Through savings in grant writing and subscriptions alone, IFA saved its stakeholders nearly $10 million dollars across the state. More than that, they saved time for people who would have to pay for the analysis, visualizations, and narrative—or learn how to do it themselves.

“You know, someone who’s just curious about local housing isn't going to sit down and read a data dictionary,” Matt continued. “I have a master's degree and took statistics classes and so on, and even I have to sit down and be like, okay, time to really read this thing."

SEE IOWA'S GENERATOR

About Iowa Finance Authority

The Iowa Finance Authority (IFA) provides assistance and resources for affordable housing, water services, and agricultural infrastructure across the state.

Visit their website →

 

Our Partnership

Builder + Press Generator
  • mySidewalk Platform Access
  • Dashboard Generator

The Outcomes

Since its creation, IFA has been able to strategically plan for additional single-family homes to address their significant demand. It also helped to underscore the value of public-private partnerships. IFA was able to show the housing need across all income levels and was nominated for an Innovation Award at NCSHA.

But this work is just the beginning.

IFA wanted to ensure ongoing data questions were addressed from the same cohesive system. They knew the Iowa Profile was just the first step. To continually ensure data-driven decision-making, they would need an ongoing way to access the same data.

By using Sidekick, IFA envisions its next steps with community stakeholders: one where question prompts deliver immediate answers.

IFA-Sidekick
"I love that it says what the sources are. With a lot of other AIs, they'll simply provide the information they think you want without citing it. I really appreciate that Sidekick has actual links to where they're pulling the information."
Harrison Yu-Zepeda

Greater Des Moines Partnership

IFA has become not just an innovator in housing, they’ve showcased what a data-driven state approach can inspire.

With continued engagement to their stakeholders, IFA now annually reviews updated data with their stakeholders. What’s even better - those hundreds of indicators across various Iowa geographies - are updated by mySidewalk. 

Ashley and team can now spend time engaging stakeholders on what the data could be doing for their community, not where the data is.

“The Iowa Profile is essential for making data-driven decisions and taking a holistic approach to community development,” said IFA and IEDA Director Debi Durham.

In addition to all of this, mySidewalk was able to help LDH achieve the following outcomes:
Save Time & Money
Save Time & Money
Avoid searching through hundreds of public sources to find key metrics
Engage Partners
Engage Communities & Partners
Rally everyone around a shared understanding of community needs, insights, and priorities with data that is easy for any audience to understand.
Make-Data Driven Impact
Make Data-Driven Impact
Lift community voices and identify the most important focus areas to improve health
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