Three problems with PDFs and three ways your organization can get around them.

Here are some strategies government’s can use to effectively communicate.

A closer look at how the internet and social media have evolved and the role government plays.

The work of government has always made for some great stories. Here's how to tell yours.

Design is not merely a first impression of something we are about to consume. It controls how we consume content, from the order we read elements on a page to the shape and spacing of the letters. Take care to design your work well.

When you produce something for an audience, remember that you are asking them to give you a treasure: their time.

During fast-developing news events or public health crises, communicating the latest information to readers becomes even more essential.

Clear, impactful writing is not easy to achieve. If you want to improve your writing skills and connect with your readers, these tips can help.

You might be tempted to post the perfect picture you found on your site quickly and let it shine, but it's important to be careful.

Images are essential to communicating data. A good photograph, even a stock image, can provide emotional context to dry statistics. Pictures also make publications visually enticing and break up long blocks of text. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

We just made 74 stock images available for you to download and use for free. The photos are high resolution and you can freely edit and crop as needed.

Videos are great at making your story engaging and well-rounded. It’s also one of the biggest reasons why it’s better to publish reports as web pages instead of PDFs. Here are some things to consider when adding videos to your story.

A great design can take your presentation, story, or report from looking good to looking great - and way more professional. This means great illustrations, the right colors, and beautiful imagery. But if you like most people don't have a designer around, use these three free tools to make your presentation look beautiful.

Before you create a report or story, you want to get the fundamentals right. The fundamentals form the basis of your story and consist of three questions that you want to ask and answer.

The Tenderloin, a neighborhood in downtown San Francisco, spans 40 blocks and is home to nearly 35,000 residents, many of whom are low-income and immigrants.

LiveStories recently attended Seattle's "A City for All" hackathon, which focused on making the city friendlier for senior citizens. Here's what we learned.

We speak to Cory Kendrick, Director of Population Health at Summit County, about his work reducing infant mortality. 

LiveStories learned a lot from the NACCHO conference in Pittsburgh. Here are some of our takeaways.

Learn how Sitka, Alaska, is growing local, healthy food to combat high rates of diabetes and obesity.

In this final excerpt from our e-book—Happy Citizens: Measuring Performance in the Public Sector—we explore how governments can use Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to target and contextualize their initiatives and programs. 

Feeling safe, and feeling loved, are the second and third most fundamental requirements for happiness, according to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. 

Physiological needs relate to the necessity of food, water, and shelter for survival. In a modern society, this concept translates to money.

In many ways, government policies are responsible for the happiness of the public. How, then, can happiness function as a metric for success?

Governments have always relied on others to help achieve impact, and vica-versa. By promoting collaboration between government and nongovernment groups, important data can reach more people.

In the past six years, transparency and efficiency have come a long way. However, we are still far from the goal.

10 simple steps to how you can make your meetings more effective and efficient. Get the most out of your meetings in the shortest amount of time.

Incidence and prevalence are both ways of measuring the frequency and spread of diseases.

Health expert Sofia Husain describes the difference between morbidity and mortality. 

Like peanut butter and jelly, INDEX and MATCH are two Excel functions that work better together. Here's how to use them.

The HLOOKUP function is useful when you have to find a value in a spreadsheet with many columns. Here's how it works. 

The VLOOKUP function is one of the most useful tools in Excel's arsenal. Here's how to wield it. 

Unfortunately, some data visualizations just don’t work. Here are five examples of classic data visualization fails.

Open data can be uploaded in a variety of formats. This post discusses the main ones.

Open data is free to the public, easily accessible, and usable as an input for programs and other functions. 

The government has a vital role to play in the "Internet of Things" (IoT)—both in wielding these technologies for the public good and in regulating them against malfeasance.

We gathered 10 useful Excel tricks that we think you should know. See how you can work smarter in Excel. 

To really capture the meaning and potential of data, you need people to bring it to life —in the form of local collaborations, news stories, and apps that provide the audiences you’re trying to reach with easy access to information and services.

If publishing data is Open Data 1.0, the next iteration will involve putting these data to good use. Open Data 2.0 should inform policymaking budgetary decisions, raise awareness of issues, and ultimately, empower communities.

At his inauguration, President Trump detailed a list of social maladies facing Americans, including child poverty, a crippled manufacturing industry, poor education, crime, and drugs. We look at the data.

The CDC's 500 Cities Project released vital health measures at the city level. See how LiveStories explores this data in a series of new stories. 

The next administration will need to make important choices about both government data and Iraq. What can Mosul’s ruins tell us about the future of government data?

During fast-developing news events or public health crises, communicating the latest information to readers becomes even more essential.

Garbage in garbage out. You might have heard this saying before, and it’s especially true when it comes to data - the quality of your data has a big effect on the quality of your output. There is a lot of data available online, but finding or gathering data can be cumbersome. To help you speed up that process and save time, we have curated a list of online health data resources. 

You have important data and insights you want to present, but how do you make sure the right point comes across? Here are three tips to remember when you present data.

One of the biggest hurdles in working with data is when the data is “dirty”. Typically dirty data is when you have duplicates, names that have been spelled differently across data entries, or your data is in the wrong format. Cleaning up your data helps make sure that everything is categorized correctly so you can make better sense of it. Here are five easy steps you can take to clean your data using Excel.

In the past six years, transparency and efficiency have come a long way. However, we are still far from the goal.