The Florida Community Innovation Foundation (FCI) conducts groundbreaking work connecting Florida’s citizens with trusted information and resources to navigate challenging times. We do this by empowering young innovators to build scalable social services technology for their communities.
We envision a Florida where everyone has equal access to trusted information, critical services, and rewarding careers. As a network of young professional volunteers and students, we engage in public service projects that move the needle on resource access and other key issues that impact Floridians.
We design and develop projects that have a media component (e.g. public health behavioral nudge campaigns), a data science component (e.g. data stories about nonprofit services in Florida), and a public service digital product component (e.g. the Florida Community Resource Map, an interactive, public-facing portal through which Floridians can quickly and conveniently locate key resources available to them, including but not limited to: healthcare, food and nutrition).
Our partners
With the Florida Community Resource Map, we’ve partnered with the United Way of NW FL and the Central Florida Foundation. The new version of the Map will also feature resources from Panhandle 211, the North Central Florida Foundation, and others.
On our public education campaigns, we’ve partnered with the Science Cheerleaders and the UF-VA Bioethics Unit.
For our research projects, we’ve worked with undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Michigan’s School of Information, the University of Central Florida, Berkeley, the University of Florida’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service, and American University’s School of Public Affairs.
With the City of Miami, Parks & Recreation Department, FCI is building a historical education app that introduces Floridians to the historic City Cemetery.
FCI also works with CodeGNV on various projects.
How we got our start: Florida Alliance for Response to Epidemics (FARE)
One of FCI’s first projects was the Florida Alliance for Response to Epidemics (FARE).
Beginning in March 2020, FARE, with input from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from the fields of public health communication and medicine, developed a behavior change messaging campaign in the public interest. The goal was to encourage Floridians to social distance, and message designs were developed from contemporary themes using an adapted grounded research methodology.
By the numbers, in 2020…
185,824 Unique Floridians were reached with FARE social media ads
411,829 Impressions generated by FARE content
11% Of total population in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, Tampa, and West Palm Beach areas were reached with FARE ads
$457.38 Total ad spend across all FARE campaigns
FARE partners included the UF-VA Bioethics Unit, the Science Cheerleaders, the Central Florida Foundation, and the United Way of Northwest Florida.
Public interest outreach examples:
For the entire archive of FARE activities and for periodic public health content, see FARE social media: