Lessons Learned
Keep up with our latest demographic insights
Shortly after Carolina Demography launched in 2013, we started getting emailed requests for help in using Census data and other data sets. These trickled in from journalists, policymakers, non-profit leaders, and academics throughout the state – and we answered them if they weren’t too complicated and as we had time. By 2018, we were getting over 100 of these requests a year. Two years later, the number of requests for data assistance had tripled –…
As an applied demography group located within a research university, we are always looking for ways to share what we learn with the public and highlight work that takes place within our domain. Today, we're kicking off a series of interviews with interesting people from all across North Carolina who frequently use demographic data in their work. If you'd like to nominate someone (or yourself) for this series, please reach out to demography@unc.edu - this…
Demographic data is useful to a wide variety of organizations, ranging from nonprofits to businesses to government. Knowing the statistical characteristics of a population is key to future planning, making public policy decisions, and for organizations to know how to best reach and serve their intended audience(s). Through my work at Carolina Demography, I have become interested in how different industries use demographic data in their daily work. I recently had the pleasure of getting…
A few months ago, Carolina Demography's director, Rebecca Tippett, asked me to develop 100 detailed one-pager reports with over 120 data fields – one for each county in North Carolina. As a graphic designer, coding in a brand-new language seemed overwhelming, but the idea of entering 120 data fields on each page would have been time-consuming, opened up the possibility of transcription errors, and required hours of copyediting. So I spent the next few weeks…
I visited Minneapolis last month to attend the data journalism conference SRCCON (pronounced “source con”). SRCCON hosts conversations and workshops for people who work on data teams – particularly those in newsrooms. While Carolina Demography does not produce traditional news, we do communicate data findings to the public on a regular basis.I was excited to learn more about how other teams work – and wanted to share a few things I learned at the conference.
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