The Census Bureau started releasing APIs. Anyone who knows a small amount of R or Python can access it. You might shrug this off at first, but I’d seriously consider the opportunity this brings.

Whether you're doing market research, opening a business in a new city, or placing targeted ad buys, this data is super helpful.

There’s a mindset in our profession that we have to make things easy for our audience. We don't want them to think too hard while reading our dashboards and analyses.

But do we take that attitude too far? When trying to make our work more accessible, do we dumb things down too much?

I've built reporting solutions for multiple organizations now and the one complaint I hear the most is that the data is useless. Dashboards never give much insight and the KPIs they display are usually found in the source tool.

While it's nice to have all that data in one location, dashboards never do what stakeholders are wanting the most – tell a story.

Telling a story is a bit of a cliche with data, but most people want to open a dashboard and see what’s unusual about the data they’re analyzing.

There's a great metric that gives the audience that ability and allows them to tell that story themselves. Only...it's not always intuitive for them...

That metric is variability.