Measuring What Matters: A City-Focused Guide to Health Data and Changemaking
Nov. 18, 2025
The City Health Dashboard was developed to help people use data to improve health outcomes in their cities. Through our years of experience working closely with policymakers and others who care about health in cities, we have learned that city leaders understand the power and potential of data, but often experience challenges turning data into action.
To help address this need, we created “Measuring What Matters: A City-Focused Guide to Health Data and Changemaking", a practical, easy-to-use data playbook designed to support cities as they seek to integrate data into their workflows, program design and policymaking.
A suite of accompanying project worksheets are also available to support city changemakers through the process of tackling a problem using data. These interactive resources can help public administrators increase their data capacity, improve the process of data-grounded decision-making, and support taking action guided by data. Learn more about the five worksheets below, and try them out for yourself!
The Interactive City Health Dashboard Explorer Worksheet provides an overview of the City Health Dashboard, guides users through different features, and poses questions that prompt reflection on how to use Dashboard data for local initiatives.
The Project Planning Worksheet helps cities assess organizational and community assets, identify opportunities for partnerships and community engagement, set goals, and identify data resources and gaps. This worksheet is meant to be used at the start of a project or program to help cities understand the environment in which they will be working, document strengths and opportunity areas, anticipate potential obstacles, and manage project deliverables.
The Data Decision-Making Assessment and Data Decision Tree Worksheet help users think critically about potential data sources and assess whether a data source meets their needs and goals. These worksheets also demonstrate how to align the data sources with users’ values and current financial and analytic capacities.
The Considerations for Building Data Dashboards Worksheet helps organizations that are considering building a dashboard of their own. It provides steps to help users identify driving goals and values in developing their own data dashboard, define their audience, evaluate their budget and staff expertise, and clarify their dashboard’s priorities. The worksheet prompts users to examine organizational data capacity and bandwidth to identify potential limitations in building a dashboard, and to explore if existing alternative data sources or metrics already exist that might meet the organization’s goals.
We hope this data playbook and accompanying tools serve as a valuable resource to support data-based decision-making and improve wellbeing in cities across the country. Once you’ve explored the playbook, we’d love to know how you are incorporating these insights, worksheets, and data into your work! Please reach out to share your experiences with us.