Communicate More Effectively and Efficiently

In 2020, the Partnership for Strong Communities (PSC) collaborated with Connecticut Data Collaborative (CTData) to update Housing Data Profiles for Connecticut's 169 towns and 7 counties. These reports, crucial for policymakers and developers, needed automation to replace the cumbersome manual process. PSC and CTData enlisted R for the Rest of Us to automate report generation using R. We created a customized report template and implemented parameterized reporting, resulting in visually appealing, easily updated reports that provide essential housing data insights efficiently.

Judi’s House/JAG Institute, a nonprofit in Colorado, provides support regarding childhood bereavement. In 2018, they created the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model® (CBEM) to estimate rates of children losing a parent or sibling before adulthood. Annual CBEM reports were produced, but racial and ethnic data breakdowns were lacking until 2021. Partnering with R for the Rest of Us, they generated high-quality, easy-to-understand reports on bereavement disparities by race and ethnicity. These national and state-level reports, created using parameterized reporting and RMarkdown, help advance their vision that no child should be alone in grief.

The World Health Organization's Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) aims to improve global vaccine access. To better report progress, the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University partnered with R for the Rest of Us in 2023. They produced 72 user-friendly country-level reports in English and French, using parameterized reporting. These reports highlight individual country progress, use less technical language than previous online scorecards, and are in a printable PDF format for review.

In early 2020, Juan Clavijo from ORS Impact sought help from R for the Rest of Us to automate over 50 reports on outreach efforts during the U.S. Census. ORS Impact, partnered with the Democracy Funders Collaborative, needed to efficiently combine quantitative data on populations and qualitative data on outreach. Using R, they developed a collaborative approach, automating the generation of high-quality reports with charts, maps, and descriptions. This process allowed ORS to rapidly produce and revise 52 reports, achieving their goals without extensive manual effort.

In March 2021, Kathleen Doll from Intention2Impact collaborated with R for the Rest of Us and the Asian Pacific Islander (API) Council to map food resources for San Francisco's API community. Automating data collection with R, we used tidycensus, osmdata, and web scraping tools. We created an interactive website map for the entire city and specific neighborhoods. These maps, matching the API Council’s branding, can be easily updated with new data by re-running the R code.

Sustain East Africa (SEA) reached to R for the Rest of Us about developing a custom package to assist in their reporting work. The package we developed has functions to create custom tables, ggplot themes, and a custom R Markdown template, all done with SEA branding. The resulting package enables SEA to more easily and beautifully report on their results.

Moving to R has helped the OMNI Institute dramatically improve the efficiency of their workflow, including automated data tracking and generating dozens of reports automatically.