Finding publicly available data for extension planning and programming: Developing community portraits

Although there have been calls for many years for Extension professionals to use secondary data in their work, finding appropriate data online can still be a challenge. With the multitude of data sources available online, it can be helpful to use the concept of developing a community portrait as the context for becoming proficient at locating secondary data. Once compiled, the data in a community portrait can have multiple uses. In this article, we provide direction for finding specific online data sources and using those sources to compile a community portrait, tips on using data websites, and a quick guide to help with locating data.