The Value of a Data Walk: Community Wisdom Informs Future of East Metro Pulse
Nearly 10 years ago, the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation wanted to understand how community members feel about opportunity and belonging in the East Metro area. In partnership with the Wilder Foundation they started to develop a survey—but they knew they couldn’t do it alone.
They invited 18 people who lived in Dakota, Ramsey and Washington counties to help them create the East Metro Pulse Survey to make sure it resonated with the intended audiences and captured accurate insight to guide foundations, advocates and policymakers toward more community-connected work.
In 2024, the survey was distributed for the fourth time, but with an important addition. This time, SPMF partnered with Research in Action (RIA) to integrate a Data Walk with impacted community members to assess how well the survey reflects East Metro residents’ lived experiences—and how the process can be more transparent, accountable and effective.
What is a Data Walk?
Data Walks are a common tool in participatory research, but everyone does them a little differently. At Research in Action, our Data Walks are structured to do more than just present research findings and get community feedback. We facilitate a space for authentic reactions and reflections to the data by providing context and framing, processing findings, sharing stories and narrowing in on recommendation to move forward.
Fifteen impacted community members participated in the Data Walk
Who participates?
When appropriate, RIA ensures participants are primarily impacted community members rather than institutional and organizational stakeholders. That was the case for the East Metro Pulse data walk.
We developed an outreach strategy targeting key demographic groups represented in the East Metro Pulse data and those who may have been underrepresented, including parents with young children, single heads of households, and Black, Latine, and Asian community members. We collaborated with community organizations to distribute information about the Data Walk and a total of 15 attendees and two interpreters participated.
What happens at the event?
Community members sharing input at the Data Walk
The Data Walk agenda included three core activities with participants:
Learning about participants’ knowledge of the East Metro Pulse Survey through dinner conversations
Presenting key 2024 East Metro Pulse Survey findings and collecting feedback from participants
Inviting participants to share their vision for future East Metro Pulse surveys and to discuss how funding could best support the East Metro community
How does it support the community and the institutional partner?
For Stephanie Peterson, the Foundation’s Director of Learning, the Data Walk was a key step in the survey process.
“Engaging community in a data walk was essential to our interpretation of the survey results,” she said. “Survey numbers can only tell us so much; we wanted to know more about how people’s lived experiences may or may not be reflected in the data we were able to gather.”
One of the most compelling themes we heard from community was a call for accountability in the data. “In addition to advocating for more regular engagements like the Data Walk, community members provided multiple recommendations for how to implement accountability measures for how data and funds are used by an organization,” said Dr. Madasen Briggs, RIA’s Lead Junior Research Associate. “That allowed us to craft recommendations for all stages of the survey process, from outreach to reporting, in just a three-hour event.”
Some of the those recommendations included:
Making the survey items representative of the community members by updating demographic questions
Implementing accountability tracking processes for East Metro Pulse data and funding decisions
Developing partnerships with trusted grassroots community organizations
And the Foundation is taking those recommendations to heart. “We’re hoping to continue to engage community voice as we interpret and use these survey results, both now and into the future,” Peterson said.
Dr. Madasen Briggs (second from left) and Stephanie Peterson (right, holding microphone) present on the results of the 2024 survey and the community process in March
Would your organization or project benefit from a similar process?
“Data Walks are an effective tool to build a more direct relationship with the community members and elevate impacted community members' voices in problem-naming and problem-solving,” said Emma Wu, RIA Junior Research Associate. “So they are critical aspects of both large research projects and powerful standalone engagement moments that can bolster any initiative's validity and trustworthiness.”
Organizations can hold Data Walks to address questions like:
Do our findings reflect impacted communities’ experiences? In what ways? Who is represented by our findings and who is not?
Is our analysis addressing community members’ priorities?
Are we presenting findings and interpretations in a way that honors community members’ lived experiences?
Are we presenting findings and interpretations in a way that is accessible to community members?
While RIA often includes Data Walks across projects within our Equity in Action model, we have conducted other projects centered around Data Walks as a key project output. For our partnership with the Foundation, we developed the event specifically based on data already collected for the East Metro Pulse survey. We’ve previously partnered with the Pohlad Family Foundation and the Workgroup on Expediting Rental Assistance to host community meetings addressing whether previous reports on rental assistance were reflective of community members’ experiences with the system.
Learn more about Data Walks and our Equity in Action model here. Interested in partnership? Contact us!