How to Explore Network Demographics
Your network is made of diverse members, representing a variety of sectors, focus areas, and communities. Using member attributes to color nodes can help identify subnetworks and subgroups organized around subtopics, as well as understand the breadth of your network members. This is a great way to demonstrate your collaboration to stakeholders while identifying gaps and areas for improvement.
Some different demographics to consider:
- Sector: Partners can come from the non-profit, private, or public sector. Each brings their own unique benefits and challenges.
- Focus Area: Organizations tackle a variety of community and social issues, ranging from healthcare and homelessness to education and the environment.
- Geographic Area: Entities often represent a specific neighborhood, city, or other geographic area, both formal and informal.
- Target Population: Network members often target different populations, like young children and families, people experiencing homelessness, or the HIV community.
- Power & Influence: To what extent are you working with a mix of powerful institutions as well as smaller, less influential groups with their own unique value.
With few exceptions, a greater level of diversity in your network leads to more opportunities to discover new resources, ideas, and innovations. While diverse networks may require more time for facilitation and process, the benefits are almost always worth the time and effort.
How to Assess Your Network Demographics with Network Maps
- Open the Node Filters on the left (click the node icon).
- Under “Color By,” click the dropdown menu and select ‘sector.'
- Use the controls on the right to take an image of the network map.
- Repeat the process with other attributes, including Focus Area and other custom attributes.
- Once done, open the maps you saved and review them individually.
Click each node color on the legend to the right to filter nodes by attribute.
How to Assess Your Network Demographics with Charts
You can also assess your demographics using the Analyzer's Chart feature.
- While in the Network Analyzer, click "Charts & Tables" at the top right, under the Data Capture Navigation Menu.
- Select either "Bar," "Column," or "Donut" Graph depending on your needs.
- Under "Show Results Based On" select "Attribute"
- Underneath, select the attribute to visualize.
- Click the "Save" button at the top right and give the chart a name.
- Repeat the process for any other attributes of interest.
These maps and charts are great assets to include in grant proposals or reports for stakeholders to demonstrate your commitment to collaboration with a broad array of community partners. You can also use them over time to track your progress and see if you are filling gaps in representation across your network.
Next, we'll show you how to analyze trust and value across your community partner relationships.
Next Article: How to Analyze Trust and Value
Related Articles
View Network Scores
The network score module displays a overview of your capture metrics and network scores like centrality, density, in-degree and out-degree connections, trust, and value. It is a valuable resource for making sense of your ecosystem members and data. ...Introduction to Data Analysis
From the Data Capture Overview, you can see your survey response rates broken down by how many respodnents have submitted, started, and have yet to start answering your survey. As you begin to receve responses, your status levels will update and your ...How to Assess Relationship Intensity
Next, you can consider the quality of connections in your network by assessing the intensity of your relationships. Our relationship-intensity scale ranges from simple awareness of each other to full integration. The emphasis is not on the frequency ...Network Analyzer Navigation
The Network Analyzer is where your relational data comes to life. With the ability to map networks and relationships, engage in social network analysis, create charts, tables, and GIS maps of your network, there are dozens of ways to explore your ...How to Map Your Network
Start by displaying a network map with results from your network member selection (NMS) question. This shows who in the community is working together and where there are gaps. Coloring your nodes by sector or focus area provides another layer of ...