Portland Means Progress

Prosper Portland is the economic and urban development agency for the city of Portland, Oregon. The organization describes itself as "committed to growing quality jobs, advancing opportunities for prosperity, creating vibrant neighborhoods and communities, and collaborating with partners to create an equitable city, with prosperity shared by Portlanders of all colors, incomes and neighborhoods."

One of the programs that Prosper Portland runs is called Portland Means Progress. Designed to grow a more inclusive economy in the city, this program helps businesses hire diverse employees and ensure that they develop internal cultures that allow everyone to thrive.

Every year, Portland Means Progress conducts a survey of businesses to help them reflect on their work. Until 2022, Prosper Portland had only used data from this survey to create a high-level impact report. Businesses, however, did not get to see their individual results and, without a way to see their progress across years, were in the dark about their growth.

It was with the goal of creating reports for businesses that Prosper Portland reached out to R for the Rest of Us. Working together, we helped to developed beautiful reports that show businesses what they have done over the years.

One of the challenges of this project was to produce reports from what was relatively simple data. For example, each year businesses list the areas they have implemented policies around culture change. While others might think to share this data in text or a table, we came up with a way to compellingly visualize it. And beautiful data visualization like this isn't just for looks – it gets businesses to take notice of their results and reflect on their progress.