The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Datastory Releases Greatly Enhanced MapDash 2.2

By Ken Howard

Earlier this month, Datastory released its much anticipated and greatly enhanced MapDash 2.2. 

It is amazing how far we’ve come so fast.

It was only two years ago that Datastory and FaithX teamed up to begin shaping a faith-based version of Datastory’s powerful MapDash demographic/analytic platform. Then in July of last year, after several rounds of rapid prototyping and testing in judicatories in five states, Datastory launched MapDash for Faith Communities, and FaithX launched consultative strategic missional planning programs that leverage its unique capabilities for faith communities and the judicatories that support them.

Even then the capabilities of MapDash went far beyond any demographic tool available at the time, bringing real time interactive experience and powerful analytics available nowhere else. MapDash 2.2, honed by input and feedback from actual users, goes even further, with an updated layout, more than double the data, and comprehensive improvements to tools and widgets. 

One of those tools is the new Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report (NMIR), an infographic report designed to give users an interactive snapshot of their neighborhoods. As described in an earlier post, FaithX employs the MapDash NMIR as the core of its Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Assessment, a 3-hour, online consultation designed for congregations seeking to better understand and engage the communities they serve.

Some of the new data features of MapDash 2.2 include:

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Broadening Our Reach – Increasing our Offerings

It’s been 12 months since Ken Howard and Matt Felton, respective founders of FaithX and Datastory, appeared at the exposition hall at the Austin Convention Center in Texas to launch Datastory’s new MapDash for Faith CommunitiesTM strategic missional planning platform along with FaithX’s Strategic Missional Consulting initiative. 

Much has happened in the last year with both FaithX’s missional consulting services and Datastory’s platform. And we’d like to bring you up to date on all the progress we have made in such a relatively short time.

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Neighborhood Missional Intelligence – Report or Assessment?

The 2nd of 8 posts on MapDash Analytics

by Ken Howard

FaithX Strategic Missional Services now offers two resources to explore missional opportunities at the local community level. The first is a Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report. The second is a Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Assessment.

Think of the difference between the Report and the Assessment as the difference between taking a “selfie” and sitting for a portrait, except the subject is not you but your community and both are much more detailed than you might expect.

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An Introduction to MapDash Analytics

To fully understand location-based data we need to organize and examine the data in four different ways. We have to:

  1. Visualize – Get your faith community’s data on an map, so you can explore it visually.
  2. Contextualize – Find your faith community’s place in the data, so you can examine its missional context.
  3. Analyze – Interrogate the data, to reveal what it means for your faith community.
  4. Socialize – Share your data, with leaders, members, the community, funders, and other stakeholders

Today’s post is about step 3, and the analytic tools MapDash for Faith Communities provides that help you reveal what demographic, lifestyle, and other data mean for your faith community or judicatory.

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Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report – A New MapDash Feature

By Mary Frances, Senior Associate Consultant

The Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report is a snapshot of data from a 15 minute DriveTime (or other DriveTime of your choice) around a given address.  It’s just one of the many features available to you via MapDash for Faith Communities.  Put in the address of a local congregation or town and quickly find out generational predominance, median age and income, unemployment rate, access to transportation, and much more.  At a glance, you can start to identify where you might need more information and what to do with the information you have. If you can get all this at a glance, wouldn’t you want to dig deeper?

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