Reimagined Data Explorer Reveals New Insights on Afterschool Programs

Afterschool Alliance / 2025 / Education, Racial Equity

Hero image for America After 3PM tool National and State dashboards

Overview

Graphicacy continued an ongoing partnership with the Afterschool Alliance for a complete overhaul of the America After 3PM (AA3) website to share new survey results regarding afterschool care. Graphicacy re-envisioned the site’s data explorer and landing page to create a more customizable solution for the Alliance and a more intuitive experience for parents, educators and policymakers.

Launch Project

Services
CMS Integration
Data Management Solutions
Data Visualization
Engineering
Geospatial Mapping
Ideation & Prototyping
Interactive Web Applications
UX/UI Design

Background and Challenge:

The Afterschool Alliance works to ensure that all youth have access to affordable, quality afterschool programs, which keep kids safe, inspire them to learn and help working families. The Alliance strives to build solidarity for increased investment in these initiatives at the local, state and national levels.

Every five years, the Alliance conducts a nationwide survey to assess the state of afterschool education in America. Core findings from the most recent AA3 survey in 2025 include:

Almost 9 in 10 parents support public funding for afterschool programs.
Unmet demand remains sky-high: Of 30 million children whose parents want them in afterschool programs, 3 in 4 can’t attend.
The top barriers to enrollment remain cost, transport, location and availability.

In partnership with Graphicacy, the Alliance wanted to update not just the survey data on their AA3 website, but the entire online experience. They hoped to help users explore AA3’s core findings in greater depth.

The challenge of this particular iteration—the third AA3 report for which Graphicacy has designed and built a data explorer tool—was to effectively present complex information in visual form and intuitively organize it across geographic scopes and topics. The revamped site needed to allow everyone, from parents to policymakers, to navigate their way through the findings without assistance. For their part, the Alliance needed the ability to update and modify the site post-launch.

Opportunity and Solution :

As in previous years, the AA3 survey results showcase the unmet demand for, and benefits of, afterschool programs in a data-driven way while identifying which children and families are missing out.

The new AA3 site weaves together three components: A condensed landing page that displays top-line summary data, a robust data explorer and a collection of downloadable assets and shareable graphics. The rebuild enabled Graphicacy to approach the site with fresh perspectives based on five years of user feedback and the latest best practices in UX design.

For example, the new landing page retains the tab-style organization of data in four categories—Demand, Benefits, Challenges and Support. Each map visualization on the page leads users into the data explorer, which presents the survey’s rich underlying data at national, state and community levels. However, Graphicacy reduced the number of navigation layers and options so users reach their desired data in fewer clicks.

Graphicacy also made the hierarchy of information within each tab much more apparent. They moved related assets, such as fact sheets and reports, from sidebars to the primary data explorer view for heightened visibility. Users now have options to call up PDF summaries and export graphics for presentations and social media.

On the back end, Graphicacy integrated the data visualizations with the Alliance’s content management system. The new setup empowers Alliance staff to modify on-page content, add new assets, reconfigure graphics and much more, ensuring that this AA3 report offers fresh insights for years to come.