Guides make it easy to navigate the billions of data points in mySidewalk. Organized by topic, you can use Guides to analyze issues and/or start telling data stories quickly.
mySidewalk maintains a continuously growing library of expertly curated Guides, often inspired by the issues and questions that are top-of-mind for our customers across various disciplines.
What's in a Guide?
Each Guide is designed around a high-level topic and broken down into a handful of related datasets.
For example, our guide on Food Insecurity contains four related datasets on Food Accessibility, Barriers, Community Outcomes, and Food Programs.
Each dataset within a guide contains:
Recommended data indicators (typically 5-12), which you can add to Seek search. Add them all at once, or select just the ones you need.
Story blocks, or templates, featuring best-practice visualizations of the recommended data. Use these to get a jump start on your story!
Examples of published reports, dashboards, and other assets that utilize the recommended data. Use this as inspiration!
Related datasets
Check out the full list of Guides here.
How should I use Guides?
There are lots of ways to use guides — and depending on the topic and your current use case, you may use them in different ways.
Use a guide to support your entire workflow — from finding the best data; to analyzing it; to creating and sharing a short report for your stakeholders.
Alternatively, use only the parts that are most helpful in the moment.
Fielding a quick question about birth outcomes in your community? Grab a few of these and do a quick search.
Looking for indicators on the digital divide to recommend to a colleague? Check these out.
Just want a gut check that you've chosen some excellent indicators for your grant application for food programs? See what we'd choose.
Want to see what other organizations are doing with mental health or substance use data? That's what customer examples are for.
One of the best use cases might be helping you get started on a long report or dashboard. Consider using the guide's structure as an outline for your project.
For example, if you're building your own CHA dashboard, create sections for each of the sub-topics in the guide: Our Story, SDoH, etc. - and use the story blocks in each dataset to get the section started. Build from there.
