A how-to guide for navigating the America After 3PM dashboard: Part 1

While recent reports, fact sheets, and infographics detail key findings from the America After 3PM household survey of more than 31,000 parents of school-aged children, the America After 3PM dashboard was created to provide broader access to the survey’s rich data set, which includes national, state-level, and a few region-specific data. Through the dashboard, you can also find state-specific fact sheets and news releases; share data through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; and download dashboard pages directly to your device.

Accessing the dashboard

In addition to the direct link to the dashboard (Fig. 1), there are a few ways to get to the dashboard from the America After 3PM landing page. At the start and at the end of the storytelling narrative on the America After 3PM landing page, you can find links that will take you directly to the dashboard. Clicking on the “Explore the Data” button at the top of the landing page or the “Visit Dashboard” button at the end of the storytelling narrative will both take you to the America After 3PM national dashboard.

Fig. 1

There are also links within the storytelling narrative that will take you to the dashboard (Fig. 2). While the buttons at the beginning and the end of the landing page will take you to the national dashboard’s overview page, buttons embedded within the storytelling narrative are linked to the topic that is being explained. For instance, the “Explore the Data” button within the section of the narrative discussing public support at the national level regarding investment in afterschool programs will take you to a national map in the dashboard where you can see public support for afterschool across states. 

Fig. 2

Orienting yourself to the dashboard

A simple way to orient yourself once in the dashboard is through the navigation located at the top of dashboard (Fig. 3). This section is meant to help visitors get their bearings, providing a floorplan of sorts for the data. Starting with the dropdown box located in the upper left-hand side of the dashboard, you can navigate to national, state, or regional data.

Fig. 3

To the right of the dropdown boxes are tabs that arrange America After 3PM data into the following categories:

• Overview - Presents the main data points from each of the categories
• Demand - Details the number and percentage of children, overall and by grade level, who would participate in an afterschool program if one were available to them through the four editions of America After 3PM, as well as the number and percentage of children who are alone and unsupervised between 3 and 6 p.m.
• Benefits - Includes findings related to supports provided in afterschool programs, parents’ satisfaction with their child’s afterschool program, and parents’ overall perceptions of afterschool programs. For example, in this section you can find the percentage of parents who are satisfied that their child’s afterschool program has knowledgeable and caring staff, the top activities and services provided by afterschool programs, and the percentage of parents who agree that afterschool programs keeps kids safe and out of trouble.
• Challenges - Provides information regarding factors that played a role in parents’ decision not to enroll their child in an afterschool program, such as cost and availability of programs. You can also find in this section information on afterschool program participation, including the number of children in afterschool programs, average time spent in programs, and average cost of programs.
• Support - The last category includes the percentage of parents who are in support of afterschool and summer programs, the percentage of parents in favor of public funding of afterschool programs, and the percentage of parents, by political affiliation, in favor of funding afterschool programs.

Also in the upper section is a navigation tool to show you where you are in the data, and how to find your way back to the home page. In this series of screenshots, you can see how when we moved from the national overview page, to the national demand page, to Alaska’s demand page, to the Dallas communities’ benefits page, the navigation tool updates to help you keep track of what data you are looking at, whether that is at the national, state, regional, or demographic level.

Figs. 4-7

“Sticky” vs. non-sticky elements

As you probably have figured out by now, the top section of the dashboard is a sticky, or static, element of the page to provide consistent access to the dashboard’s navigational tools. It will not move off of the screen as you scroll through the different dashboard pages, allowing you to easily jump from one section of the dashboard to another. The left-hand column of the dashboard is a somewhat sticky element of dashboard, depending on the page view, as it plays different roles on the national versus state-level pages.

Figs. 8 and 9

We’ll go into more detail in future blogs, but to get started, on both the national and state pages, you can find a brief overview of findings and methodology, links to fact sheets and news releases, and a link to download a PDF of the page.

Fig. 10

On the national demand, benefit, challenges, and support pages are where differences arise and where we’ll start in the next blog as we walk through the national pages of the dashboard.