Over the years, our data library has grown from a few hundred demographic variables to well over forty thousand elements that now covers both the United States and Canada. While we are admittedly data geeks, guilty of building data just for the fun of it, many of our data expansions have come directly from the needs of clients.
In our recent 2022B data release, we introduced several small, but significant databases. The vital statistics data is one such example that covers three main areas – life expectancy at birth by sex, births by age of mother, and deaths by age and sex. If we are being transparent, these were not exactly on our list of data items we desperately wanted to add. But how and why they were added is a useful study in how AGS works, so we will tell it here.
One Friday morning last autumn, we were having a conversation with a potential channel partner about our data offerings. Somewhere in the conversation, we were casually asked if we had life expectancy estimates. We did not, but we promised to investigate and report back in a few weeks.
By afternoon, the AGS data geeks were in full hunt mode and found some data – at a census tract level and missing a few states – that looked moderately promising. After the normal rallying cry “I mean, how hard can it really be?”, a strategy had been devised for filling in the gaps.
The models were developed on Saturday using our data tools (Dimensions) and our internally developed statistics toolkit that we use for everything from logistic regression to segmentation models. Just having three variables didn’t seem all that interesting, so we did the same thing with some fertility and mortality data that we had found in our search. On Sunday, the data was documented and brought into Snapshot. Maps were produced and sent on Monday morning, and the data geeks went back into ‘normal’ operational mode.
Did we land the deal? No. But along the way we expanded our offerings in the health care sector which will help to cement our position as the leading provider of small area data to the health care vertical.
At AGS, we take great pride in our ability to find and utilize obscure data in order to satisfy the real-world problems that our clients face. So, if you find yourself asking “do you know where I can find the summer range of the purple snarter-darter” you know who to ask. And if said snarter-darter is not a mythical creature, it will have left evidence which we will be more than happy to find. If you have items on your wish list, let us know, because our data geeks live for those emails.
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