Digital Equity Toolkit (1H 2025)

Digital equity speaks to the ability of individuals and communities to fully participate in the benefits of broadband.

The Digital Equity Toolkit complements the many infrastructure-oriented toolkits available from BroadbandToolkit.com.  It is designed to enable policy decision-makers, grant applicants, grant recipients, ISPs, and others to quantify and visualize non-infrastructure needs.

Digital Equity Grant Programs.  The Toolkit visualizes by tract the total Covered Population associated with the Digital Equity Act (Planning, Capacity, and Competitive Grant Programs).  It further visualizes each of the component populations (per specific NTIA definitions):  low-income households, aging individuals, incarcerated individuals, veterans, individuals with disabilities, individuals with a language barrier / low literacy, individuals who are members of a racial or ethnic minority, and individuals who live in rural areas.  

Visualizing Data.  The Toolkit includes 200+ data sets of high resolution geospatial data that speak to key themes:

• Demographics (population, households, housing units, age and gender, educational achievement)
• Devices and Internet (device ownership, internet access, broadband technologies, ownership and access by age)
• Telephony (ability to make and receive calls in the home, by age and home ownership status)
• Income (income per capita, mean household income, median household income)
• Needs / Vulnerabilities (living in poverty, participation in SNAP, participation in SSI, veteran status, etc.)
• Housing Structures (home ownership, non-conventional structures, percentage of households in single family homes, duplexes, and increasingly large multi-tenant environments)
• Race (white, black or African American, American Indian and Native Alaskan, Asian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, some other race, two or more races) and Ethnicity (of Hispanic or Latino origin or not)
  

The Toolkit visualizes data at the highest possible resolution (typically block group) and includes the same data in tabular form in other resolutions, in most cases:  national, state, county, congressional district, zip code (ZCTA), tract, and block group.

By easily visualizing a large number of related data sets one can quickly construct a data-driven narrative around specific socio-economic metrics.

A high resolution demographic / digital equity map enables planners to identify high impact locations - sometimes within two or three city blocks - for reaching specific populations.

Exporting Data.  The Toolkit allows the user to select an area and export the associated data sets into an Excel spreadsheet.

Extensibility.  The Toolkit is extensible.  It also allows the user to add boundaries or custom data layers or to introduce custom logic, performing calculations among the large number of available data fields.

Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP).  The Toolkit visualizes the final enrollment data from ACP at a zip code / ZCTA level.  It also includes ZCTA data for the two most common qualifying criteria (SNAP and Medicaid).  Finally, it includes some qualifying data  at high resolutions (block group) elsewhere in the Toolkit.

Specific People Groups.  The Toolkit includes, in tabular form,  spectacular tract-level detail on very specific people groups (see list), including American Indian Tribes, Native Alaskan Tribes, Asians, Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islanders, Hispanic or Latino places of origin, people reporting ancestry, and place of birth for the foreign-born population in the United States.

Take a few minutes to read the Introduction (a conceptual overview), the Getting Started Guide and the site License Agreement.  You'll appreciate the breadth of what the Toolkit can do.

Most of the data sets described above are available only for the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, but not for Guam, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, or the U.S. Virgin Islands.

This product is delivered via a digital download.