Census webinar shows how ACS data and data.census.gov can strengthen grant proposals

Vicky Mack of the American Community Survey Office at the U.S. Census Bureau and Tyson Weister from the data.census.gov communications team walked attendees through how to use ACS products and the Census Bureau's data platform to support grant proposals.

The webinar opened with an overview of the ACS's purpose and scope. "My name is Vicky Mack, and I work in the American Community Survey Office at the U.S. Census Bureau," Mack said, explaining that the ACS samples roughly 3.5 million housing unit addresses annually to produce detailed social, economic, demographic and housing estimates. She emphasized that ACS estimates are available as 1-year and 5-year products and must be interpreted with margins of error reported at the 90% confidence level.

Why it matters: grant writers can use ACS figures to build need statements, define service areas and identify target populations. Mack highlighted narrative profiles and data profiles as fast starting points for community-level statistics, demonstrating how to pull a narrative profile for Hinesville, Georgia, and citing a use case in which the West Cook YMCA in Oak Park, Illinois used ACS data to help secure a $1,270,000 local grant in April 2023.

Tyson Weister led a live demo of data.census.gov showing practical search and visualization steps. He demonstrated the address-search geography pin to find an address''s census tract, applied topic filters (for example, disability), and opened subject table S1810 to show estimates and margins of error (example shown: 553 people, 14.9% of the tract population with a disability). "We recommend that users reference margins of error when interpreting the data," he said.

Weister also showed how to compare multiple geographies using advanced filters (state, county, ZIP Code Tabulation Area) and how to choose the appropriate ACS product: 1-year estimates are available for geographies with populations of 65,000 or more (and supplemental 1-year for areas with 20,000+), while 5-year estimates provide data down to census tract and block group levels. In one demonstration, he reported 2023 ACS 5-year poverty estimates of 12.2% for Indiana, 15.1% for Marion County and 31.4% for ZIP code area 46218, noting the importance of switching to 5-year products to include smaller geographies.

The session covered outputs and sharing options: Excel exports for readable tables, ZIP downloads (CSV with geography IDs) for machine-readable outputs, a share link that preserves geography selections, and a cite button that generates MLA/APA-formatted citations for tables. For mapping, Weister recommended inspecting the table values first and then using the maps and charts buttons to visualize chosen variables (example: mapping the percent of households with no vehicle available across Denver County tracts, with some tracts showing as high as 44.5%).

Resources and follow-up: presenters pointed attendees to the ACS website for narrative profiles, data.census.gov for the full set of tables, the Census Academy training modules and monthly hands-on workshops, a feedback link and the census.data@census.gov contact for questions, and the ACS Data Users Group for peer discussion.

The webinar concluded with an invitation to submit ACS use stories and sign up for email updates about data releases and training opportunities. "This concludes today's webinar," Mack said.

Ending note: the session focused on practical steps for locating, interpreting and exporting ACS-based evidence to support grant applications and local planning; attendees were directed to posted slides, recordings and transcripts for later reference.