UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Idea Database project, active for more than 15 years, communicates a cross-section of ways UW–Madison positively affects people beyond the boundaries of campus.
The Wisconsin Idea Database website hosts two main sets of data:
- Projects: examples of UW–Madison activities with impact, added individually to the database by project leaders and staff;
- Profiles: external partnerships, student placements, and other key facts collected from nearly 20 offices on campus, matched to locations around the state, and used in reports generated for legislative districts and counties.
My role: I began working on this project in 2020. Currently I manage:
- Collecting, standardizing, and appending datasets from across campus;
- Producing district reports for state legislators;
- Editing crowdsourced campus listings of projects with impact;
- Promoting the project internally to campus and externally through the media.
I recently developed a five- to ten-minute presentation on the database project to share at campus conferences such as the Wisconsin Idea Conference and Showcase.
2024-25 is my fifth year collecting data and creating reports. Each year, I manage the project, setting a timeline, reaching out to campus partners, reviewing and standardizing (or correcting) data, organizing information and collaborate with an application architect and others in the Office of Strategic Communication.
In 2023 and 2024, I’ve written media releases that leverage the vast amount of data to show UW–Madison’s impact on the state. (Here’s 2023 coverage from WMTV.) In addition, I’ve developed a template for regional and county-level releases that has resulted in some coverage as well (Green County in 2024) and is useful to campus leadership as they visit partners and legislators across the state.
In the 2023-24 cycle, I took the opportunity to leverage UW–Madison switching official fonts to initiate a redesign of the reports themselves. I worked with my digital strategy colleagues (then in University Marketing) to prototype a report and review their revisions and translation of the design into HTML code and ultimately into PDFs. (Note that PDFs are used because these documents are ultimately printed and distributed directly to legislators.)
The prior design, which existed prior to 2020:
The current design, which better uses space, provides context, and fits within current brand standards:
Team: Providers of data from around campus, from Purchasing to the Registrar’s office, as well as UW System and WFAA; UX and developer colleagues in Strategic Communication (formerly University Marketing).