In the fall of 2016, a group of Nantucket residents gathered to talk about their beloved community and were surprised, and a little dismayed, to learn that they could not describe its population clearly. They determined that in a seasonal community, with a population that changes over the months, weeks or even days, it was impossible to make meaningful decisions. The group agreed that it was critical to know how many people are present on the island so social services can be right-sized and so infrastructure planning is accurate. In the absence of reliable data analytics, too many critical questions are answered with anecdotes.

That discussion launched the Nantucket Data Platform, an energetic collaboration between data scientists, demographers, data visualizers and writers, supported by local leaders from businesses, nonprofits and government. Remain Nantucket became the new business’s first client as they spent a year working on two seemingly simple questions: What is the island’s population and who are these folks? The result was a report published in 2018 called Making It Count.

Since then, the NDP and CDP has continued to answer this same question with an updated Effective Population Study published in 2023, revealing complete data details from 2014 to 2022. In addition, NDP and CDP has helped town leaders identify new in-demand air routes using mobility data, built a reliable dashboard to track leading economic indicators for the finance department and assessed the affordable housing landscape. With Remain’s support, NDP also conducted a survey to understand what the Nantucket community values the most, identify the impact of the various waste streams for the Town’s Department of Public Works and support better decision making for the regional transit authority with a customer survey. 

To learn more about the NDP and CDP, please visit their website.