Make Beautiful Census Data Maps & Tables with Social Explorer
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Finding accurate, localized demographic data can be a daunting task, especially when working on grant proposals, community assessments, or strategic plans.
Publicly available data often falls short—either it’s outdated, too broad, or not specific enough to capture the unique characteristics of a particular community.
Fortunately, the Social Explorer is a user-friendly platform that transforms complex U.S. Census data into accessible maps, visualizations, and reports for nonprofits, researchers, and community organizations.
In this episode, we’ll explore how to use the Social Explorer to quickly and effectively access the data you need.
You’ll hear:
(00:47) What is the Social Explorer and what types of census data does it use
(03:30) A demonstration on how to access the Social Explorer.
(08:26) How to look at community demographics, such as race/ethnicity at the census-tract level
(12:34) How to track changes over time, like the percentage of foreign-born residents.
(15:15) Three elements that make for a good map
Resources Mentioned
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Drew Reynolds: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Common Good Data Podcast. My name is Drew Reynolds. Have you ever struggled to find the right demographic data, maybe for a grant proposal that you're putting together or a needs assessment that you're conducting? And have you ever maybe spent hours just. Pouring over the internet, searching for demographic data about your community, only to be frustrated to find that it doesn't represent your community.
Maybe it's at the county or state or national level, or maybe that even if you can find it, that it's too old or that it's not local to your community. Well then today. If that is the case for you, you are in luck, uh, because today I'm going to share with you a wonderful tool called the Social Explorer.
And the Social Explorer is going to, uh, be a great tool that you should have in your toolkit that you can use to create beautiful visualizations and maps, wonderful and accurate tables using U. S. Census data. [00:01:00] Um, so that tool, I think one of the reasons why I use it so much is because it's so user friendly.
We all know that you can access census data out there and that you can, that it's, you'll see it in a report, but it's sometimes it's like, well, I, I need this county or I need this census tract. And you're not able to get exactly what you're looking for from what you're searching for online. And the Census Explorer allows you to really customize things to fit your needs and your community.
Now the Social Explorer is this great. You know, as I shared, um, kind of user friendly platform, it takes census data and makes it easy for you to view as a user. You can access it at SocialExplorer. com and many people can access it through either a library or sometimes a university institution. So if you have access to a public library or an institution, you can go that way.
You can also get a free trial to check it or pay for a paid version. The, um, census data that are brought in. There's two types of census data. There is the decennial U. S. census. So the one that goes every 10 [00:02:00] years, 2020. Um, and that's the big census that happens on an every 10 year basis that Congress does, um, or I guess allocates the funds for or whatever.
And then there's also the American Community Survey, which the U. S. Census Bureau puts on to collect data in between those 10 years, because 10 years is a long time, to be able to gather accurate information. It's not quite as comprehensive, and so you don't have as much data gathered, but it's really helpful, and I use the ACS data all the time when looking at demographic data.
And so you can take, Social Explorer takes these two sources of data and makes it very easy for you to view, um, awesome maps and tables. So we'll talk about how to do that. Today I'm going to give two examples of how to use the Social Explorer. One of them that's going to be looking at demographics at the census tract level.
So how you can look at demographics in a community. We'll focus on race ethnicity, though there's many different variables that you can choose from. And then we'll also look at changes over time, because I think that's also really important to [00:03:00] recognize when how communities have changed over time. And this tool can be very helpful in trying to illustrate What that looks like.
So let's go ahead and dive into the Social Explorer. Now, for those of you who are listening on the podcast, I will be doing some visualizations here. So you can check those out by going to our YouTube page. Um, that Common Good Data is our, our YouTube handle, and you'll be able to see the, uh, the visual of this podcast with it, but you don't actually have to listen to it on YouTube or watch it on YouTube to be able to follow along.
Okay, so I'm gonna go over to. The social explorer here.
So to get to Social Explorer, just go to www.social explorer.com. Um, and once you log in, uh, set up a trial account or login in through, uh, university institution or a public library, you can then access, uh, the social Explorer here, and this will take you to the homepage that'll look something like this.
And the first one, it says United States. Down here, there's different forms of data, too, that you can [00:04:00] access using Social Explorer. Things like crime data, COVID 19 data, other forms of health data, um, election data, actually. It's kind of a useful tool for that if you're really interested in looking at voting results over the course of the United States, uh, Democratic elections.
Um, so there's all kinds of options here that you can look at. But for most users, I think the most useful thing will be when you just click on United States for the census data. And when you click on the United States, a big map of the U. S. shows up, and it begins with just a simple population density indicator, which is just how many people are living per square mile.
You'll see that New Jersey over here is very dense, whereas a place like New, New North Dakota is very not so. And so you can kind of see that, uh, as you hover over each of the different states, what those indicators are at the state level. Now, um, what I think we'll start off with here is taking a look at the data tool up here in the top left.
So the top left is where you can select the different types of data that you can use. I'll go ahead and change the data from population density here and you'll see all kinds [00:05:00] of options. First at top we have the years. So here it says 2002, and that's, I'm sorry, 2022. So we'll start there. Uh, you can, as you get closer to the current moment, 23, for example, you're not, the data, you can only use one year estimates and it's not quite as good.
So I like to use 2022 and use five year estimates, um, from the American Community Survey. So I'll click on 2022 and then click on race. And you'll see here, there's a bar that says ACS 2022. I recommend not using the one year estimates. I would skip that and go down to five year estimates here. because you'll get more representative data, because it's kind of taking estimates over the course of five years of ACS data collection.
Then you'll see here how the United States Census defines race. Now you'll notice if you have been following along on our blog and podcast that I have a whole episode as well as a blog post that talks exactly about how these race conventions are changing. In particular, they're going to be adding a category for some being [00:06:00] of Middle Eastern descent, and they're also going to add Hispanic and Latino in the same question as race and ethnicity, instead of kind of separating those two things with a select all that apply option.
Anyways, check out that blog post. It's super good. So we have race here. I'm going to go ahead and click on Hispanic or Latino by race, and I'm going to click on Hispanic or Latino of any race or background, right? Now, if I Click off that and I just clicked the X here. You'll see the map has changed and we'll see areas, you know, some of the states that have the highest, uh, Hispanic Latino population, places like Texas, New Mexico, California, get redder on the map, uh, in comparison to those that don't.
So that's how you can change the data, uh, to be able to look at what you're looking for. In the bottom right, you're going to see the total population, uh, by Hispanic Latino, that shows you the data point that you're looking at. It allows you to also to adjust, cause it's giving you the scale. From zero to 95%.
If I click auto adjust, you see how it changes and it tries to make it so that, okay, the ones that are highest, for example, New Mexico get darkest in comparison to lighter ones to make it a little bit easier to distinguish [00:07:00] between the two. So I like that auto adjust tool and recommend you try it out as well.
Now this is the United States, but many of you work at a local level in local communities. And so I'm going to zoom in on. Georgia, because that's where I live and take a look at what that looks like. As you see, as I zoom in a little bit, it's just changed now from state to County, and you can see if I hover over here, Gwinnett County, DeKalb County.
You can see that as you hover over them, it's going to give you the percentage of Hispanic Latina residents using the ACS 2022 data at the county level, which can be really helpful. And you can see too, again, with our, um, with our, our, um, scale here, you can see that, uh, Hispanic Latina residents are not.
uniformly distributed across the state of Georgia. Where you see is that bigger concentrations in places like, for example, Gwinnett County, Dekalb to an extent, Hall County, Whitfield, um, and then down here just south of Columbus and Chattahoochee. So those are kind of, um, [00:08:00] um, areas of, of greater Hispanic Latino populations.
Now I can also zoom in still a little bit more. So I'll move into Dekalb County, which is a county right next to Atlanta. And as I zoom out at the county level, you see It's also, uh, big differences within counties, right? And here you see Gwinnett, um, all along here on State Route 403 and Highway 23, kind of the Beaufort Highway corridor area, for those of you who are familiar with Atlanta.
Um, and you can start to see that it's now been divided into census tracts. So, you know, we go national level, to states, to counties, and now to census tracts. And what's so great about census tracts is that this is where you can start to get local enough for many of you who do local work to get within counties.
And this is one thing that I think is often missing when we're, people are doing community needs assessment because counties are often very different depending on where you live. So I'll zoom in here on this, uh, Beaufort Highway corridor here. And you can see again, we have these census tracts with these indicators.
It gives you a good sense of where Hispanic and Latino residents are [00:09:00] living throughout the county. I can click auto adjust to kind of change the shading a little bit to get a good sense of, uh, add a little bit more variation so that I can really understand the differences between these different census tracts.
Now, it's helpful to have these maps, and if you would like, you can then say, Hey, I like this map, this is really helpful. I can click up here in the top right, uh, and click export as an image, and kind of set up my image here, I can change my aspect ratio if I want to, uh, just determining, you know, what I'm trying to communicate, and how I'm trying to communicate that, and, uh, and where that's going to show up, uh, portrait level.
So look, you can even put it on a nice, uh, social media or Instagram reel or something, right? Um, so that's, that's kind of a good example of, uh, how you can kind of set up your map, but once you've done that, you can click export here and it will download it to your computer and you can open it up and use it in a presentation or, or however you ever need to use it.
So that's how you can export maps. When it exports the map, it'll also include a legend too. So it'll show you what all the colors mean, which is really [00:10:00] helpful. Now, you have that information for the map, but for many people, you need a statistic, right? You need to say, you know, what percentage of the residents in the community that I live, in this case, would identify as Hispanic or Latino?
Well, you can do that too by getting some of those more granular numbers. But the challenge is, is like, hey, say, hey, I serve this whole community. I don't serve just one. So what do I do? Do I say 33%? Do I say 45%? Do I say 90%? You know, how do I do this? Right? So what you want to do actually is you can do something here called creating a report.
So I click on these three, uh, uh, lines here, and I'm going to go ahead and click create a report. And what that's going to allow me to do, is to create a report based on a set of criteria and I can select some of the different census tracts that I'm focusing on. Let's click on all of these, for example, and I've got my eight geographies selected here.
They have the different topics that [00:11:00] you can create. There's an essentials report. Comprehensive, Age, Sex, Race, all of them. I'll just do Essentials for now, but I think all these are worth exploring if you're interested to check out. So I'll click on Essentials, and then I'll just go ahead up here and click the button Create.
And you'll see here that it now creates a table that has some of the demographic information for each of these census tracts, 1, 2, that it has selected. I think it's just showing five, but I think I may have selected eight. So, um, yeah, if I click the next button, I'll get to the next one. And I click over here to the last group and you can see it all comes together.
What's also nice is you've got this total column here of all the census tracks. And that's the one thing that I think is most useful. So you can say, Hey, we serve these census tracks and in this census track, these are the totals and percentages of all these different demographic indicators, which is so important when doing a needs assessment.
Putting grant reports together to really be able to describe [00:12:00] the community. So I highly recommend checking out these tools. Once you've done that, you can export it just as an Excel document with percents and totals, et cetera. So all kinds of options for you to be able to access these data. And then you can, you know, create tables and graphs of your own using a tool like Excel or Microsoft Word.
Um, but then you'd have the statistics that you would need for the demographics of a community right at your fingertips. So I'll click out of creating a report. Um, I'll go back to exploring maps, come back to the United States here. Um, and let's kind of do another example here. What I'd love to do is to also show why it's so important that these data are available over time periods because you can show and identify changes over time.
I'm going to zoom into Georgia here and I'm going to change my data from population density this time to look at, we'll go 2022 and I'll click on, actually let's change [00:13:00] the year first. I'm going to go back to as far as 1990 and then I'm going to click on the button here that says native foreign born and click.
Uh, click on foreign born.
There we go. And we're looking at the state of Georgia here. And, uh, what we see here is that in a place like DeKalb County and Gwinnett County, our percentage of foreign born residents, 6, 5%, 4%. A little bit up here in Whitfield, 2%. But not much, right? Chattahoochee County, 6. 74%. This is in 1990. But if I change my years, I go 1990, then I go 2010 and I'll click on foreign born again.
And we see changes in growth, right? So Gwinnett is up to 25% now, DeKalb 16, Whitfield County, Georgia, 18%. And then I go again from 2010 and I'll click all years to 2020 and I'll click Foreign born using AC assessments. We see growth [00:14:00] here in Stewart County at 28% Gwinnett County. Uh, DeKalb County, Hall County, and Whitfield, all jumping up at higher percentages, right?
And so, if you're interested in serving, uh, you're, maybe you're a non profit and you serve immigrant communities in Georgia, it can be helpful to know and see and understand these trends, but also to be able to share with others what those trends have looked like, um, how communities have been changing over time, and then also how If your organization is to serve, uh, you know, foreign born residents, you know, how you might be able to do that effectively.
And again, this is just at the county level, but you could zoom in at the census tract level and see some similar changes there as well. So the key here is that you're able to show changes over time. So what is different about your community? Now, uh, than it was 30 years ago. And in the same way with these mapping tools, what's different about your community with the community that's right next door, um, or another county, uh, uh, just over the way.
And that helps you then to be able to tell a bit of a story. What makes your community unique? What's changed [00:15:00] over time? What's different? Uh, what's similar to other places as well, and that's what these tools are so powerful in their capabilities and being able to do. Okay, so, um, we'll go ahead and stop our screen share here.
A couple things to think about as you go out and explore these maps. I really encourage you to go to Social Explorer, sign up for a free trial, check it out, and create some maps around your community. A few things to think about when you're creating a map though. First is variation. So, make sure that you're zooming in.
At the right area. So you can, basically what you're trying to do is how can you compare your community to another one? So if you're zooming in closely, that's fine. Don't go too close into the census track, right? Have it so that you can compare your census track to others that are nearby, or the same thing for county level data that you're looking at.
Um, use that auto adjust tool as well, to be able to adjust the coloration so that you can see more clear distinctions and making sure that the, um, The legend in terms of your [00:16:00] cutoff points on percents are going to be ones that are easiest to make sense of. Second thing to think about when you're doing maps is that your map should tell a story.
So if it isn't immediately clear, when you create a map, what you're trying to do, or what you're trying to say. then I think you should adjust your map, because the most compelling maps are those that communicate something, uh, visually that you can just understand right away. Uh, I think this is certainly true when it comes to the blue and red election maps that we just had in the, uh, 24 election that was, uh, I guess one, one week ago.
Um, or by the time this airs, a little bit longer. So, uh, you know, that, that tells a story. You understand what it is, right? Um, so when you're creating a map, you should have that same level of intuition in a lay audience person who didn't create the map. When they view it, they should be able to instantly recognize what you're trying to communicate.
Third, I would select your variables wisely. So make sure that the data are the correct time frame. Um, [00:17:00] so is it the right year that you're looking at? Um, or are you comparing across years, right? Make sure it's the right geography. Do you want to get down to the census tract or is, You know, state or county level are going to be appropriate for what you're working on.
And then look at multiple indicators to tell a broader story. So if one indicator is showing something kind of funny, look at a couple of others that are, you know, change the year or go from five year estimates to one year estimates or to, you know, to the decennial census data, to just get a sense, to make sure that what you're looking at isn't some kind of outlier or something that isn't being well represented in the data.
So I always encourage you to select your variables wisely, spend some time in the tool. Try some different ones to see if the patterns that you're seeing, um, are consistent as you, as you select maybe similar, um, or otherwise correlated variables, uh, when you're doing your mapping. Um, so yeah, so those are some, some good recommendations.
So remember for maps, variation, story, and selecting variables wisely would be my recommendations. Now, if you found this conversation interesting, I do encourage you [00:18:00] toolkit that we have called the Data and Evaluation Made Simple Toolkit. Uh, that is on our website at www. commongooddata.com/simple.
And it has illustrations of how to use the social Explorer data, as well as a wide variety of other data sources that we've talked about on this podcast. And some that we haven't in that, uh, toolkit it's free available to you. And it can certainly help out when you're trying to put together a need statement or.
Uh, you know, being able to communicate about the needs or challenges that your community may be facing, or maybe putting together a grant proposal. So I highly recommend that you check out that toolkit at commongooddata.com slash simple. Thanks so much for listening today and can't wait to share with you our next episode.
