Keeping track of statistics -- about monies spent, about guest demographics, about products or services provided -- often gets overlooked in the busy-ness of things, or downplayed because it's not really "spiritual," or it's considered too cold, too business-like for social ministry. We think that the more we know about what we're doing, who we're serving, and how well what we do matches the needs of those we serve is important. To that end, we keep track of a lot of numbers, and we run a lot of analyses on a pretty routine basis. We're also starting to build longitudinal data of how guest demographics and serve efficacy may change over time.
Real-Time Reporting
When we originally built the site, this page had three columns -- one column citing reports from some of the studies we've run over the past few years, one column on normative demographics and statistics, and a third column with reports from the PEPbase software. Since those PEPbase reports essentially provide you with the opportunity to get real-time data on the exact studies we were citing, we've removed the columns, and replaced them with direct navigation to the online PEPbase reports and normative statistics. As we build more longitudinal data and reports, we may include some of those -- comparing changes in age/gender distribution over time, for instance, or changes in language distribution by ZIP code -- we may look to include some of those reports here. For at least the remainder of 2014, however, we think the PEPbase Report Menu functionality will provide you with better information.
These reports are similar to those built in to the PEPbase software, and pull data from the actual databases used by the PEPartnership agencies. However, the versions available here have been modified to remove any possibility of accessing personally identifiable data on Pantry guests. For the new website, we've included agency-specific data, as well.
We use the information gathered from these reports from our own use of PEPbase in many of our presentations and papers. We have provided access to these adapted report formats here to allow visitors to and users of this site to generate their own summaries for use in research or presentations that they may be undertaking. If you do include results from this site in a presentation or paper, we would, of course, appreciate being credit as the source of the information; we would also greatly appreciate receiving a copy of the presentation/paper.
The default definition for the data to include in these reports is data from households who were active within the last 18 months, with a 2 week offset from the date that the report is generated. For example, a report generated on March 14, 2011, would include data from September 1, 2009 through February 28, 2011. These dates can, however, be manually redefined as the user's request. The "frame" for the data will be reflected in the report header.