Fission worked with the Knight Foundation and the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) to create the Civic Data Challenge in 2012. The challenge was a competition that challenged participants to turn raw data of “civic health” into beautiful, useful applications and visualizations to help better understand communities and what is needed to make them thrive.

Fission also designed and developed the website, helped to build partnerships, and spoke at the Data2.0 conference in San Francisco to launch the challenge. After the launch, Fission created a multimedia video to document the launch, engaged in live Tweeting at events, invited high-level personalities in the tech and civic worlds to serve as judges, attracted sponsors to the competition, ran ads on Facebook, helped train NCoC staff in Twitter and Facebook best practices, promoted the competition on blogs and social media, and analyzed metrics about social reach to refine the strategy. 

Over the course of five months, Tweets from @CivicData were seen by over 1.4 million people, and high-profile judges were secured, including: Vivek Kundra, current VP for Salesforce.com and former Chief Information Officer of the US; Sonal Shah, former director of the White House Office on Social Innovation and Civic Participation; Leslie Bradshaw, President, COO and Co-founder of JESS3; Bob Kocher, partner at Venrock and former Special Assistant to President Obama for Healthcare and Economic Policy; Beth Kanter, author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media; and many others. 

In total, there were 25 submissions from 63 participants presented for the challenge. One of the four first place winners was Politify, a project by UC Berkeley students Nikita Bier and Jeremy Blalock. The team specializes in visualizing and personalizing public policy data. Their winning entry for the Civic Data Challenge shows the impacts of the Presidential candidates’ proposed economic policies at the household and zip code levels. 

Learn more about the challenge and its submissions here: http://www.civicdatachallenge.org/

"You guys are seriously awesome. Congrats on all the hard work paying off! The site looks amazing!"

Kristi Tate, Director of Community Strategies

http://www.ncoc.net/