Named of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2023, USAFacts guides you through the maze that is government data. Founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, we’re a team of career researchers, data analysts, statisticians, writers, and communication professionals. We present government metrics in digital offerings like our Annual Report, Government 10-K, and State of the Union in Numbers. We standardize the data, communicate insights through clear visuals, and share the facts without fluff or jargon. Our 2023 goals included a massive increase in organic website traffic and brand acceleration through high-quality content to get the data to as many Americans as possible.
There are over 90,000 federal, state, and local governments in the US — and no universal standard for collecting and reporting on these governments’ data. That’s where we come in. Our job is to find the data to answer Americans’ questions, then clean and contextualize this data into digestible and — critically — accurate reports.
Our data scientists and analysts clean up the metrics to present a full picture of trends over time. Our mighty content team, led by Content Director Courtney Sperlazza, authors data-driven stories with interactive visualizations on core topics like the economy, crime, health, education, and our changing population. Between writing, edits, data checks, and visualization, a minimum of five people contribute to every article.
After thorough scrutiny, these reports are distributed to the American public and used by thought leaders like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
Our top article for the year concerns which countries own America’s debt. This has been a top traffic-driver, popular with our tens of thousands of newsletter subscribers, and is cyclically popular on Reddit. Our team parsed Treasury Department numbers for visuals that shine a light on what nations own the most US securities. No one’s surprised to see China on the list, but Belgium? That lights up Reddit. We also sorted debt holdings for dozens of countries dating back to 2011 so readers could track steep declines or rises from nations including Russia, Argentina, and many more.
This year, the USAFacts team has published at least 10 articles a week featuring over 20 data visualizations — that’s thousands of pieces of nonpartisan and easy-to-digest content informing the American people, a significant output coming from an organization outside the journalism world.
In addition, our special data projects team delves into in-depth numbers storytelling, including a story on inspections of childcare centers that possibly prompted one state to fix its very out-of-date public data. Our research team manages our three major annual reports: the America in Facts, the State of the Union in Numbers, and the Government 10-K. Plus, USAFacts’ nonpartisan advocacy team has direct relationships with members of Congress, has testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on Modernization, and has directly contributed to the passing of bipartisan legislation on shortening the backlog for untested rape kits.
In the past year, our efforts have driven significant growth in organic visitors to our website, newsletter signups, and social media followers, delivering the facts that matter to more Americans than ever.
