COVID-19 Relief Spending Tracker
Some Context
In the summer and fall of 2020, I was part of a four-person team (in partnership with two external vendors) that launched a COVID-19 Relief Spending Tracker.At a time when billions of dollars were going out the door for pandemic relief, the Project On Government Oversight wanted to shed light on two fundamental questions: Where was this money going? And was it reaching those it was most intended to help?
The database included four main parts:
- Overview, the landing page for the database where users could filter types of federal relief by state, and compare this with data such as unemployment rate, population, and minority population percentage
- Map View, where users could dig into the data further by state, county, or zip code
- Table View, where users could search individual assistance or contract transactions by state, county, zip code, or recipient, in addition to other filters
- Industry Overviews, where users could browse relief spending by industry sector
My Role
In my role as the Project On Government Oversight’s creative director, I joined the team to ensure the database stayed brand-aligned, to project manage creative tasks with our vendors, and to guide the overall design and user experience of the database.Additionally as part of this project, I:
- took point on vendor research, and found RS-21 and FuseLab Creative, the two external vendors we would end up partnering with for this project
- conducted asset research for all photos used in the Industry Overview section of the site
- presented this database at the 2021 OECD Global Anti-Corruption and Integrity Forum and at Data Foundation’s 2021 Data Symposium
- helped produce a series of tutorial videos for using the database
Impact
As a result of our work on the database, the White House’s COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force requested a presentation from the team walking through the database and our lessons learned from the pandemic.The site also won three CSS Design Awards for UI, UX, and Innovation.