Background

Marquette University's School of Communications, in collaboration with the Milwaukee Business Journal, contracted with us to support an investigative report on bank closures in Southeast Wisconsin.

The reporter, Sari Lesk, uncovered systemic barriers Milwaukee's entrepreneurs from minority backgrounds faced in securing funding for starting or expanding their businesses.

Challenges

Wanting to understand how the consolidation of lending institutions was impacting entrepreneurial opportunities, the reporter and her team were initially faced with challenges accessing, analyzing, and interpreting complex bank data.

The overwhelming volume of data was the primary concern that surpassed the capabilities of standard tools like Excel, complicating storage, access, and manipulation efforts. This issue was compounded by the impracticality of downloading and handling such large datasets on local machines.

Solution

To address these challenges, we implemented comprehensive data-driven solutions that included:

• Migrated the massive bank data to a secure, cloud-based platform, enabling efficient storage, access, and scalability.

• Implemented data cleaning and transformation techniques to address missing values, inconsistencies, and formatting issues, ensuring the data's accuracy and reliability.

• Created interactive dashboards and visualizations, allowing them to explore and analyze the data without needing advanced technical skills.

• Employed statistical analysis to uncover connections in the data set that could be further investigated by the journalism team.  

• Facilitated data storytelling techniques to communicate complex findings clearly, tailoring them for a non-technical audience.

Results

Our partnership with Marquette University's School of Communications was instrumental in the development of the "Flight of Banks" report, a compelling and data-driven narrative about Wisconsin communities.