Arts & Culture: Outreach to Underserved Populations

Challenge: A museum would like to broaden its suburban visitor base to include more underserved families lower income families living in areas with limited access to cultural opportunities. Your job is to design an outreach program that will entice this target market to visit the museum and document the process for a grant report.

Approach: Select the applicable component(s) of CVI. Lower income families are likely to cluster in communities with lower Economic Potential. Similarly, limited access to cultural opportunities corresponds to low Community Amenities scores.

Level I CVI Solution: Begin by visually comparing the Standard Maps of Community Amenities (red map) and Economic Potential (green map). You may wish to print them so you can view them side-by-side. Identify low scores outside the City of Chicago by focusing on the light colors on the maps. Note that southern Cook County appears to have several areas with low scores in both categories (close-ups of southern Cook County from the standard component maps are reproduced, below). Select an appropriate community or group of communities in which to focus your outreach efforts.

Subscriber-Level Solution: Because this part of the example deals with community-level custom maps, the CVI user must first become an MCIC subscriber. Click Subscribe on the left hand side of the page and then click the Become a Subscriber bar. Fill in your information and click the Submit button at the bottom of the page. There is no charge to become an MCIC subscriber.

Use Custom Maps/Reports to obtain CVI scores and component maps for the communities you have selected. Add or subtract surrounding tracts, as appropriate, to create a custom area that fits the profile of the target population and covers a geographic area that makes sense for your program. For example, if your program will involve high-touch recruiting activities, you may wish to concentrate on a single municipality to focus efforts on a relatively small number of people. On the other hand, if you need thousands of participants, select several communities with low scores in both categories. Subtracting any individual tracts with high Economic Potential and Community Amenities scores will help focus your outreach efforts even further.

The Economic Potential and Community Amenities maps for your custom area(s), paired with corresponding Score Cards that include benchmark scores for the City of Chicago, Suburban Cook, and five collar counties, will help you target outreach and advertising in those areas most likely to have residents in the target population and will also provide documentation of your selection process for the grant report.

MCIC Member Solution: As an MCIC member, you can also ask MCIC for expanded data tables for each targeted area. These expanded tables, available exclusively to MCIC members, include scores for each of the indicators in each of the sub-indices that make up the three components of CVI.

Using the expanded Economic Potential data tables, the museum can assess aggregate income per square mile, shelter cost burden, home ownership rates, educational attainment, and number of wage earners per square mile to document the economic status of the target population. Using expanded tables for Community Amenities, the museum can determine what kinds of community institutions (libraries, houses of worship, places of higher-education) and Arts, Culture, Leisure, and Amusement opportunities exist in the target community to help identify potential outreach and advertising partners and to focus special access programs.