Smart Scholarships: Using Opportunity Atlas Data to Boost Your Impact
If your organization provides scholarships, you do much more than just fund individuals. You invest in the future of your community, its educational attainment, its workforce, and its economic mobility. Put simply, every scholarship dollar has the chance to impact both a unique recipient and affect change much more broadly. To maximize the impact of each award you make, it's essential to understand where the greatest needs and opportunities lie. This is where a tool like the Opportunity Atlas become invaluable.
The Opportunity Atlas offers a powerful yet simple way to visualize where educational access, workforce development, and economic mobility are most needed, helping you pinpoint exactly where your scholarships can make the biggest difference.
What is the Opportunity Atlas?
The Opportunity Atlas offers a clear snapshot of economic, educational, health, and community well-being across states, counties, and even down to the Census tract level. It helps you understand "opportunity", including rising out of poverty, for those who live in a given area, highlighting both strengths and issues that need support. This means you can make informed organizational and programmatic planning decisions based on solid data, not just assumptions.
The Power of Combined Data: A Complete Picture
While the Opportunity Atlas provides big-picture data, it really shines when you combine it with information you gather directly from your local community, including students you serve. Think of the Opportunity Atlas as your map, and your direct insights as the detailed street view.
Your own data is invaluable: Simple questions in your scholarship applications or surveys can collect valuable information about student backgrounds, challenges, needs, and goals. Interviewing students, holding focus groups, or even having students advise your program can provide powerful stories and insights that data alone can't capture.
Local connections are game-changers: Talk to high school counselors, college advisors and administrators, local businesses, and other non-profits. They have real-time, on-the-ground knowledge about what's happening in your community and where the needs truly are.
A note on data for smaller communities: For smaller communities, like those with a population under 20,000, finding highly detailed quantitative data can sometimes be challenging. Information may be redacted from public sources to protect individual privacy. In these instances, the importance of qualitative data—gathered through direct conversations with students, families, community members, and local organizations—becomes even more critical. Their lived experiences are rich sources of information that can fill in the gaps where broad statistics might be less granular.
By combining the broad view from the Opportunity Atlas with your own direct data and local connections, you get a full, rich understanding of the challenges and opportunities.
How Your Scholarship Program Can Use the Opportunity Atlas
Here are practical ways to integrate this resource into your work.
Determine where scholarships are needed most. Use the Atlas to pinpoint counties or areas with lower scores in education (like "Associate Degree or Higher (% of adults 25 and older)") or economy. These are the places where students face more barriers and where your scholarships can be a true lifeline.
Example in action: Let's look at this data:
County A: Associate Degree or Higher - 34.3%
Georgia: Associate Degree or Higher - 43.1%
Nationally: Associate Degree or Higher - 43.8%
(Compare this to 61.2% in Santa Clara County, CA, a tech hub)
This clearly shows County A significantly behind state and national education levels. For your scholarship program, this immediately signals a strong need for funding post-secondary education in your area. By combining this with stories from local students about the cost of college or lack of local opportunities, you paint a vivid picture of the need.
Make a powerful case to supporters and donors. Use the Atlas data to show donors exactly what's happening in your community. "Only 34.3% of adults in our county have an associate's degree or higher," is a compelling statistic. Add a personal story to provide a more full picture: "Sarah, one of our scholarship recipients, dreams of being a nurse but faced significant financial hurdles, illustrating the real-life impact of these statistics." Remember that:
Concrete data demonstrates the critical need for funding and how a donor's contribution can directly address a documented gap. It builds trust and shows accountability.
The data gives you a strong opening for new donor conversations. "We've identified a significant need for higher education support in X community, and our scholarships are designed to directly address this."
Use it for strategic planning and program improvement.
Use the Atlas to set measurable goals such as, "We aim to increase the number of scholarship recipients from high-need areas by X%."
Over time, you can revisit the Atlas to track your progress and see if the indicators in your service area are improving. This helps you understand your collective impact and make adjustments to your programs as needed.
If your organization is considering expanding, the Atlas can help you identify other underserved geographies where your scholarships could have a significant impact.
Simple Steps to Use the Opportunity Atlas:
Go to the website: Visit opportunityatlas.org.
Explore the data:
Use the map feature to navigate to your state and then your specific county (or even Census tract).
Focus on the "Education" and "Economy" sections.
Look at key indicators like:
Associate Degree or Higher (% of adults 25 and older)
High School Graduation Rate
Unemployment Rate
Median Household Income
Poverty Rate
For deeper insights into economic mobility: Explore metrics like expected household income for adults who grew up in your community, broken down by race and ethnicity, as well as the community's overall economic mobility ranking compared to the rest of America.
Compare and contrast: The tool lets you compare your community's data to state, national, or even other county averages (like Santa Clara County in our example).
Look for trends: See how data has changed over time to understand ongoing challenges or improvements.
Download and use: You can often download the data for your own research, reports, and presentations.
By combining the powerful insights from the Opportunity Atlas with the invaluable data and stories you gather directly, your scholarship organization can go beyond just providing aid. You can become a strategic force for educational equity and workforce development, truly making a meaningful difference in the communities you serve.
Ready to maximize your scholarship program's impact? Schedule a free 30-minute consultation with our team. We can help you use data, including the Opportunity Atlas, to understand local needs, and develop strategic scholarship opportunities that make a real difference in your community.
