A study of current PNC branches and "communities of concern"

Community development through personal finances workshops specifically targeted to areas of concern: poverty, high crime, single-mother households, and low education.

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Inspiration

Allegheny County published a dataset with community factors to help decision makers concentrate their community impact efforts through metrics of the Allegheny County Community Need Index 2018 through the CSV dataset. We were inspired to see which communities were most in need and identify how PNC can help through retail branch locations. Thus, we are putting the main street love back into the customer experience.

What it does

Workshops will be advertised on the website for personal finance. Meeting customers were they are, if unbanked. Welcome everyone regardless of present or past account status.

How we built it

Phase 1: Identify target areas

  1. Downloaded the community need index csv as a spreadsheet.
  2. Cleaned the data for incomplete reporting, ie zero crime or poverty
  3. Sorted by Single Mothers percentage, poverty, low amounts of households without anyone with a bachelor's degree, and high amounts of "shots fired" calls to 911.
  4. Narrow it down to 10 neighborhoods in Allegheny County as "communities of concern" Phase 2: Visualize where are the "communities of concern" in proximity of branches
  5. Map the communities in concern of 1.4
  6. Map the branches in those areas or in a commutable distance. Anyone can make their own map without any API calls with [My Google Maps] https://www.google.com/maps/about/mymaps/ Phase 3:
  7. Protype messaging with branch website mockup with Google Sites by using Google to leverage existing assets.
  8. Being transparent about where are the areas of concern by publicly publishing map from Phase 2 thus helping people living in the areas of concern attend workshops in or in a nearby community.
  9. Showing our dataset to show that our this is not bias but data-informed decisions.

Challenges we ran into

  • not having a specific programming language in common yet overcoming through finding communality with Google tools and Microsoft Excel. Sometimes simple tools are fine.
  • communities that lack branches at all: North Side and the West Mon Valley.
  • coming up to speed with the scripting behind Google Sites

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Accomplished the front-end design of the website in order to update PNC workshop program

What we learned

We learned how to analyze data and find the connection between different dataset in order to figure out in order to increase social goods.

What's next for A study of current PNC branches and "communities of concern"

  • working with existing programs like "Growing Up Great"
  • inviting the community into the spaces that are branches using the real-estate for public good
  • advance the honest, customer focused, respectful values in the "communities of concern" to achieve results
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