‘Just the facts’: Seeking to provide the public with the government data they need

Making government data more accessible and easier to understand: That’s the standing goal for Poppy MacDonald.

MacDonald, a former news executive, now leads “USAFacts,” a nonpartisan, not-for-profit civic initiative that has been collecting and disseminating government data for nearly a decade.

Launched by tech tycoon Steve Ballmer in 2017, “USAFacts” has grown into a leading resource for journalists, lawmakers and everyday Americans looking for government data and trend lines.

And in an election year, MacDonald told The Hill, the work of her small but growing Seattle-based team is under a microscope as more Americans look to better understand how their federal, state and local governments function and make informed decisions about how to vote this fall. 

“As people are overwhelmed with information, we think it’s really important that people have their questions answered with just the facts,” she said during a recent interview.

MacDonald and a staff of a few dozen data analysts, engineers and researchers collect stats and figures from more than 100 government sources on topics ranging from immigration to the economy and crime.

They synthesize and analyze the data, transforming the raw numbers into graphics, videos and other visualization tools in an effort to simplify issues such population dispersion, demographic change and border security.

The visceral political debate around these topics makes USAFacts’ objectivity even more important, MacDonald said.

“We don’t tell people what decisions they make or how they should vote, our goal is just to provide the data,” she added.

“USAFacts,” was launched in 2017 by Ballmer, the billionaire former top executive at Microsoft, who stated an explicit goal of finding out more about what parts of the federal government were and weren’t working.

“I wanted to understand the government more broadly by the numbers,” Ballmer says in a promotional video on the organization’s website. “Government itself is an ingestion machine, not a production machine. We are on an extreme of words versus numbers, and a rebalancing is helpful.”

As with any data set, particularly topics of public debate, context is key, MacDonald said.

“When Steve hired me … he did originally start the initiative because he wanted to know from a philanthropic, giving perspective, what the government programs were that were effective,” she said.

Her experience in the at times fickle and constantly changing business side of media made MacDonald a good fit for Ballmer’s project, which had collected millions of data points but needed to organize it and build audience for a yet to be launched brand.

MacDonald was previously president of Politico USA after stints at the National Journal and Gallup.

“Having a background in media, how to make complex data relevant for readers is an important skill,” she said.

MacDonald and her staff take advantage of many of the common audience metric tools used by large digital publishers, such as Google Analytics, to target who is coming to USAFacts.org, estimating about a million visitors each month.

The not-for-profit has also recently launched a weekly newsletter with a subscriber base of more than 290,000 and regular social media campaigns to promote its content.

But unlike many large digital publishers, USAFacts does not have a revenue model and is not beholden to private shareholders.

Staying current based on the news cycle is part of their strategy.

The site published a report breaking down President Biden’s State of the Union Address earlier this year, a project it called a “non-partisan data-driven” snapshot of the speech.

“The State of the Union might be heavy on policy or accomplishments, but it’s seldom nonbiased, which is where the 2024 State of the Union in Numbers comes in,” the report reads. “These are historic metrics — how you use them to advocate for changes you want to see in the country is up to you.”

Ahead of this year’s election, MacDonald said USAFacts has seen an uptick in interest in data specifically concerning the economy, such as the average cost of living and trends on salaries for public school teachers.

“People are most interested in what’s happening around them,” she said. “People want to compare data to their lived experience so that’s allowed us to leverage local data to take people from asking a question about immigration broadly to go more locally at their state or county.”

As USAFacts works to better scale and publish the data it collects, its leaders are aiming to build connections with more media partners as it grows its brand.

“We want to be that definitive source so we can answer any questions Americans have about what’s happening in their country,” MacDonald said. “There is a lot of human effort to make sure its trustworthy, that the data is right and it’s just the facts is incumbent on our team so we can continue to be a trusted brand.”

Updated: 11:39 a.m.