Edward Lowe Foundation

Need data? YourEconomy.org (YE), our free, online research tool, tracks the performance of more than 44 million U.S. businesses (including 24 million active ones) across time, providing detailed information about job creation and establishment growth at the local, state and national levels. It’s data that’s easy to access — and easy to understand.

The YE website draws its raw data from the National Establishment Time-Series (NETS), a longitudinal data source from Walls & Associates. Among YE’s features:

• A super-fast platform.
• New metrics to sort statistics, such as three key employer sectors (noncommercial, nonresident and resident establishments), with resident establishment data further subdivided into five business stages.
• The ability to dig deeper into three key factors that produce growth: net openings, net expansions and net relocations.
• A handy section that enables you to rank states and MSAs by employer category sectors, stages and growth factors.

Bottom line, these metrics provide a new lens to view the business composition of your community and growth trends of your companies — and see how that growth is reflected in new jobs and sales.

Although YE’s dataset is large and detailed, you don’t need a doctoral degree in spreadsheet design to use it. You don’t need to spend hours reading tutorials, and you don’t need an economist standing over your shoulder to interpret the numbers. Finding unique, relevant data is a simple matter of jumping on the website and clicking your mouse. No hassles, no headaches.

Learn more …

Data can have incredible impact, especially for economic-development professionals. It can uncover trends you weren’t aware of, explain what’s happening in your region and measure the success of growth strategies.

YourEconomy.org (YE) enables you to see business activity at the national and state level, but most important, to view data about your own turf and get fast answers to questions like:

• How does my local economy compare to the entire state or communities in other regions with similar demographics?
• What kinds of companies are growing the fastest?
• What percentage of jobs are generated by resident establishments? (This is important because, as YE shows, jobs generated by resident companies are less vulnerable during economic downturns.)

Instead of relying on anecdotal evidence, YE provides the hard facts you need to:

• Target programs and initiatives more effectively.
• Track the success of programs and communicate their impact to stakeholders and policymakers.
• Connect workforce-development programs with economic-growth initiatives.
• Improve regional planning.
• Get a handle on not only what kinds of growth trends are happening and where they’re happening, but also why they’re happening.

Bottom line, YE lets you take a data-driven approach to economic-development efforts. Otherwise, you’re operating on opinion. For more information about YE and how other economic-growth professionals are using it, download this PDF.

YourEconomy.org (YE) is a free service for anyone with an Internet browser, iPhone or iPad.

For economic developers and researchers who really love to slice and dice data, we’ve created a subscription service that enables you to build custom regions by state, MSA, county and ZIP code.

YE+ subscribers can also:

• Further refine their regions by clustering companies within specific industries via three-digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes.
• Purchase targeted company contact information from Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), which includes the company’s six-digit NAICS code.
• Download data from the custom regions into a spreadsheet for further analysis. (This may sound relatively simple, but users tell us that it’s a huge time saver — and eliminates the potential for transcribing errors.)

Not only does YE+ provide access to even more detailed establishment and job information around the country, it also delivers the information to your computer desktop from an interface that’s fast and easy to use.

To arrange a demo or find out more information about how YE+ can help you, contact Andria Signore.