Community indicators are "measurements that provide information about past and current trends and assist planners and community leaders in making decisions that affect future outcomes". They provide insight into the overall direction of a community: whether it is improving, declining, or staying the same, or is some mix of all three.
In essence, indicators are measurements that reflect the interplay between social, environmental,and economic factors affecting a region’s or community’s well-being. Community indicators projects typically are conducted by nonprofit organizations within a community, although in some cases they are initiated by the public sector.
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Community indicators are not a new concept; they have been in introduced since 1910, when the Russell Sage Foundation initiated the development of local surveys for measuring industrial, educational, recreational, and other factors. The processes used by the Sage Foundation are similar to those that reemerged during the 1990s. But the difference today is the use of indicators to consider the full spectrum of a community’s well-being, not just isolated factors. Nowadays, indicators are used by many constituencies within a community. After a decade of renewed attention to community indicators, they now represent a valuable mechanism to improve monitoring and evaluation in planning.
Russell Sage Foundation employed “over two thousand local surveys taken on education, recreation, public health, crime, and general social conditions” to assess social conditions. The first survey was conducted in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Interestingly,in the late 1990s, Pittsburgh has again embraced indicators, with its Sustainable Pittsburgh Goals and Indicators Project.) Many of the surveys used by the Sage Foundation were conducted by nonprofit organizations, such as chambers of commerce and citizen committees. These surveys yielded social trends indicators and were popular until the Great Depression and World War II, when economic measures such as the gross domestic product or gross national product indicators took greater precedence.
Community Information Systems (CIS) bring together a wide range of community indicators - social, economic and environmental data and information around objectives:
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