Overview

Velir recently partnered with The Annie E. Casey Foundation, which was established by UPS founder Jim Casey to help vulnerable children and their families. The goal of our engagement was to develop a system that presents state- and city-level data on child well-being in a highly visual fashion.

We faced a big engineering challenge in building this site. To meet the clients’ specifications, we had to allow users to view data in raw form, as well as create custom graphs, rankings, and color-coded maps on-the-fly. And, because these custom views don’t exist before they load in the users’ browser, we had to ensure that the system could dynamically render the formats in real time, without impacting the performance of the site.

The resulting solution, the KIDS COUNT Data Center, gives policymakers and citizens the data they need to benchmark child well-being, to gauge the seriousness of the problems facing children, and to guide policy trends and goals on behalf of children. Users can quickly slice and dice data to meet their needs—and they are never aware of how hard the site works to make it happen.