The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing & Homelessness Dashboard was released four months ago on August 21^st. Currently, the Dashboard has data, local and national research, stories and a weekly blog. The goal of the Dashboard is to create a one-stop-resource for all housing and homelessness information in the community that anyone can access and use.

Since its release in August, the Dashboard has been visited over 13,500 times. Taking out the initial release days when traffic was high, the Dashboard is visited on average about 100 times a day.

There have been 1,503 new users (2,468 sessions). Most users are from United States, including: Charlotte, Gastonia, Raleigh, Atlanta, Huntersville, Durham, Kingston, Matthews, Syracuse, Mint Hill, Winston-Salem, Davidson, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington and Cornelius. The Dashboard has also been visited from users in Canada, China, India, Argentina, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, Brazil, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Spain.

Here’s what we’ve learned so far from how the site is being accessed:

Most (60%) of the users are new. 40% are returning users.

After the landing page, the highest visited pages are the Building Bridges Blog, Progress (System Performance Measures) and Data Snapshot.

Photo provided by Amy Hawn Nelson

The most popular blog post was Amy Hawn Nelson’s personal and community reflection on the impact of housing policies, including redlining. If you have not yet read it, you can access it by clicking the link above.

Dashboard users stay on average a little over 2 minutes on the site and view 5.5 pages per session. The unofficial industry standard is 2 pages per session and 2 to 3 minutes for average duration. This means that Dashboard users are staying longer and engaging content.

SO, WHAT?

Using Google analytics, we will continue to look at how the Dashboard is used in relationship to the content that is on the site and compare it to how it is used as it changes over time.

The Dashboard was intended to be a starting place with an eye always toward growth. We have added a process for the Research & Evaluation Committee of the Housing Advisory Board to review and recommend reports on housing and homelessness that originate from other sources like the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Check out the Regional & National Report Pages to see the new reports added along with the committee’s “So, What” to consider.

Plans are currently underway for the 2018 new additions to the Dashboard. Click here to subscribe for regular updates.