How data is helping Pearl Jam band with the Seattle Community to tackle homelessness

We banded together with Pearl Jam and All Home to address the problems around homelessness and shine a spotlight on solutions that are making a difference.

For two nights in August, Pearl Jam rocked Seattle. The band’s first hometown appearance in five years, the Home Shows brought together nearly 100,000 fans for two great nights of rock.

But the Home Shows ended up being about far more than music. In the months leading up to the shows, the band used their collective voice to bring the Seattle community together to address the region’s homelessness crisis. Their vision focused on bringing a broad coalition of area businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits together.

Tableau is proud to call Seattle home and even prouder to be a part of that coalition. As a member of the Home Shows community, Tableau made a pledge of a $1m in software and services to help local nonprofits leverage their data along with $50,000 of financial support to local organizations serve those in need.

A shared strategy to fight homelessness with data

The Home Shows campaign also connected us with the team at All Home, the organization overseeing the Seattle/King County Continuum of Care system. All Home coordinates federal funding throughout 300 local homeless service providers, to help ensure that homelessness is a rare, brief, and one-time state for as many people as possible.

Tableau Service Corps volunteers are working with All Home to visualize data around homelessness in the Seattle area. These Tableau dashboards will help politicians, nonprofits, and the Seattle community better understand who is homeless and why.

The volunteers are also building management dashboards available to city leaders and the public, showcasing the flow of people through the homeless services system, and how effective these services are in getting them back into permanent housing.

In addition, Tableau Foundation was among the more than 50 leading organizations that called on regional leaders for a “shared strategy to fight homelessness” and for a centralized regional leadership to drive that strategy.

Visualizing the Home Shows Campaign

This past week, the band announced the results of this initiative and published an interactive visualization on Tableau Public that tells the story of how the Seattle community has come together.

The viz shows a couple of different engagement metrics, including an overview of the $10.8m funds raised. Some donors chose to contribute to the Home Shows Fund grant pool, while others like Nordstrom and the Raikes Foundation made pledges alongside the band and its fans.

The vizzes also take a look at the excitement on Twitter through the #TheHomeShows hashtag. Fans can find themselves in the constellation of more than 12,500 tweets that reached as many as 132 million people with news about the Home Shows campaign.

From the start, we hoped businesses, foundations, and individuals would see themselves in this work. The Home Shows initiative is about bringing the issue of homelessness closer to all of us—increasing our understanding of a complex issue, our empathy for our neighbors experiencing homelessness, and our resolve for working together. We’re proud of what our city has done. Now we need to stay inspired. There’s a lot more to do.

Stone Gossard, Pearl Jam Guitarist

Seattle has been Tableau’s home since 2004, and we are passionate about tackling the issue of homelessness in our region. The Home Shows brought a city together not just for a couple of nights of music, but to help people living on the margins be seen, understood, and helped. We know data is an important part of that process, making visible the needs of people who may feel invisible. And together, we’re working so that everyone in the Seattle area can find a home of their own.

Since 2015, Tableau Foundation has invested in programs that provide services for homeless populations around the country, working with Community Technology Alliance, Community Solutions, A Way Home America and others. We’re excited to apply what we’ve learned through these partnerships to our Seattle community. For more on the Tableau Foundation, check out tableau.com/foundation.