Empowering Nonprofits to Make Decisions for Good: Unlocking Census Data
The UBC Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC) and Imagine Canada collaborated to develop a tool for charities and nonprofits to visualize Census Canada datasets in a user-friendly way.
While there is a great deal of Statistics Canada data that can help charities accomplish their missions, it is often difficult to parse, format and analyze to make use of it. Consequently, charities are making decisions without key information that could make them more effective at understanding the needs of their communities to improve their allocation of resources and services, as well as expand their donor base.
Approach
The UBC CIC provides a solution that offers a new way to interact with Statistics Canada data by presenting it in an understandable way with an interactive map, leveraging AWS services in a server-less fashion. In the data-processing step, the team built a pipeline to parse and load the information, and subsequently clean and extend it, yielding a data schema to be used in the application. The architecture used in the solution is scalable, server-less, low cost and low maintenance, leveraging Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions and AWS Amplify. By allowing users to consume, interpret and analyze data based on characteristics that are relevant to them, such as: age, income and geography, they are able to make better sense of their target demographics.
Architecture Diagram
Technical Details
To build the prototype of the visualization tool, the team first cleaned and filtered the datasets using an AWS Step Function to run multiple AWS Lambdas. These AWS Lambdas performed functions such as fetching the census data from the StatCan website, filtering for 2016 data, and uploading the clean data to Amazon DynamoDB for storage in tables, so that it is ready and available for the user to retrieve.
When a user requests data through the application, a query is run to fetch that information from Amazon DynamoDB. The Amazon DynamoDB tables are queried using AWS AppSync, and the frontend is publicly served using Amazon S3. One of the most important capabilities for the user is being able to perform a “similar-area search” by Forward Sortation Area (FSA), which means that the user can select one variable from either of the datasets such as age, sex or income, and request to see other FSAs that have similar values for that variable. In order to perform a “similar-area search,” the FSA is passed to a Lambda function, which finds similar areas by comparing it to the other FSAs in its province.
FAQs
Q: Is this data reliable?
A: The solution retrieves information from Statistics Canada. Therefore, the reliability and transparency of the data depends on Statistics Canada.
Q: Can I get the data for my community?
A: You can download the data of your Forward Sortation Area (FSA), or any selection of FSAs.
Q: Does it offer any integrations?
A: No. The current data is pre-loaded.
Q: Do we need training to use this?
A: No, the solution interface is intuitive. A short informative video will be available to explain how to use the application.
Q: Why did you build this?
A: NPOs didn’t have any tools available capable of processing the Statistics Canada datasets they needed for making informed decisions.
Q: Who will be able to see what I am searching for?
Nobody, your queries are not recorded for any reason and are not persisted whatsoever.
Q: What are the privacy considerations for this tool?
This application does not contain personal information.
Q: I have an idea for feature updates, who do I send this to?
Imagine Canada.
Q: Can I add my own data in?
Not at the moment.
Q: Do you only have Canadian data?
Yes, currently the solution is ingesting data from Statistics Canada.
Q: Can I download all of the data? If not, how much can I download?
Yes, you can. There is no limit.
Q: Does this work on my phone?
A: Not at the moment.
Demo
Adapted from Statistics Canada, Census Explorer, 2021. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product. Data provided by Statistics Canada has been modified for use in this project. The data is licensed under the Statistics Canada Open Licence.
Link to Github repo: https://github.com/UBC-CIC/census-explorer
Photo credit: “Government Data Science Community Meetup” by gdsteam is licensed under CC BY 2.0
About the University of British Columbia Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC)
The UBC CIC is a public-private collaboration between UBC and Amazon. A CIC identifies digital transformation challenges, the problems or opportunities that matter to the community, and provides subject matter expertise and CIC leadership.
Using Amazon’s innovation methodology, dedicated UBC and Amazon CIC staff work with students, staff and faculty, as well as community, government or not-for-profit organizations to define challenges, to engage with subject matter experts, to identify a solution, and to build a Proof of Concept (PoC). Through co-op and work-integrated learning, students also have an opportunity to learn new skills which they will later be able to apply in the workforce.
