Communicate More Effectively and Efficiently

Prosper Portland, the city's economic and urban development agency, runs the Portland Means Progress program to foster an inclusive economy. This program aids businesses in hiring diverse employees and developing inclusive cultures. Annually, it surveys businesses to reflect on their work. Until 2022, survey data only generated a high-level impact report, leaving businesses unaware of their individual progress. Prosper Portland enlisted R for the Rest of Us to create detailed, visually compelling reports. These reports, transforming simple data into impactful visualizations, help businesses understand and reflect on their growth and policy implementation over the years.

The Ford Family Foundation sought to create the Oregon by the Numbers report, highlighting social and economic indicators for the state's 36 counties. Initially presented as tables of data, I transformed it into a visually appealing report, collaborating with their staff over several months. The final report effectively communicates the strengths and challenges of Oregon’s counties. Widely shared with policymakers, media, and stakeholders, it has garnered significant attention and impact.

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.

The Ford Family Foundation (TFFF) aims to improve the lives of Oregon's rural residents. They conducted the Oregon Voices survey, reaching nearly 4,500 households. TFFF sought clear, easy-to-use county-level reports for the survey results. Collaborating with TFFF, we developed these reports using parameterized reporting. The reports highlight respondent demographics and their views on key issues like finances, community pride, health, education, and employment, ensuring the data is accessible and informative for each county.

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.