“Seattle took its commitment to governing with data and evidence one step further by launching Performance Seattle, a new centralized dashboard where residents can see what their City is doing to serve their residents in seven key priority areas…Residents can now keep track of how well the City is meeting key ongoing service targets and multi-year goals through interactive and user-friendly data visualizations and infographics, as well as engage with the City on their priorities and progress.”
– What Works Cities
The Need
The City of Seattle has 12,000 staff and a $6.5 billion operating budget. However, it can be challenging for residents to understand how this investment results in meeting key ongoing service targets and multi-year goals. When this information exists, it is spread out across numerous City departments making it hard for residents to find.
Our Approach
Innovation & Performance followed three guiding principles in creating Performance Seattle:
- Resident-Focused: Surface and be accountable to data that matters most to residents.
- Collaborative: Work together to improve government use of citywide data shared across departments.
- Innovative: Automate data to make it as real-time, accurate, and useful as possible.
In 2019, IP worked with nearly 200 staff across the city government to launch Performance Seattle, a centralized dashboard where Seattle residents can see what their City is doing to improve the lives of residents in seven key priority areas: basic city services, safe and healthy communities, affordable housing and livability, homelessness response and supports, capital projects, environment and climate change, and future-ready workforce.
The Results
Residents can now keep track of how well the City is meeting key ongoing service targets and multi-year goals through interactive and user-friendly data visualizations and infographics. Performance Seattle also provides an opportunity for the public to engage with the City on its priorities and progress. Performance Seattle received 220,000 views at the launch in December 2019 and since then has stabilized at 25,000 views per month.
Since its launch, Innovation & Performance has continued to contribute to site enhancements, including experimenting with new ways of automating the data to keep the data fresh and to improve the sustainability of managing on-going performance.
Read More
What Works Cities highlighted Seattle’s data-driven approach to government, which earned the City a Gold Certification.
Project Details
- Department partners: All departments
- Project duration: 2018-2019
- Impact: Improved transparency into citywide performance
- For more information contact: