The information contained in this article is not intended as legal advice and may no longer be accurate due to changes in the law. Consult NHMA's legal services or your municipal attorney.
For this issue of Town & City, I’m taking a brief step away from Excel to highlight a valuable feature on our website that many members use, but fewer regularly update. Keeping this data current is important so that you and your fellow members can continue to rely on it as an accurate, useful, and up to date resource. For those of you who enjoy learning new tips and tricks in Excel, don’t worry, we will be back to that next issue. We will even use data from this feature to explore how you can narrow down your results to find exactly what you are looking for.
Every year a common question heard throughout the municipal world is “How do our wages compare to other towns?” Years ago, NHMA heard that question and started asking municipalities to share their wage data with us so we could make it accessible to all our members.
Whether you’re looking to access data submitted by other municipalities or update your own, simply visit nhmunicipal.org. Please note that this resource is available to members only, so you’ll need to log in first. Once logged in, click on “Wage Data” in the green bar at the top of the page.
Only designated Main Contacts for each municipality are able to update wage data. If you are the Main Contact, now is a great time to make sure your information is current so other members can benefit from this tool. If you’re not the Main Contact, we encourage you to reach out and ask that they update your municipality’s data at their earliest convenience.
With town meeting season wrapping up, this is the perfect opportunity to ensure your data is as accurate and up to date as possible!
To help narrow down the data to what you are looking for, we offer three drop-down boxes. Organization is the list of every member who has uploaded their data; Role is the position within the government; and Population Group allows you to choose population ranges.
Each drop-down box offers multiple selections allowing you to garner data broadly or narrowly depending on your choices. Not only is all the data in each drop-down listed alphabetically, but it is also searchable. Best of all, you can choose multiple items from each drop-down box. With these options available, you can decide just how small or large a dataset you want to access. When making your selection, you can choose to use any combination of the data within any of these drop-down boxes, or none at all.
For example, if you want to see all the village districts who have submitted data, you can start to type “district” in the Organization drop-down and the district members who have submitted their data will appear.
You can now click on each district to individually add it to your parameters. Because Precinct and District are interchangeable when it comes to their names, you can also start typing “precinct” in the Organization box to find the members who have precinct instead of district in their name. Once the list is narrowed down to those members, you can click on their names to add them to your district selections. If you selected an organization you did not want, simply use your mouse to place the cursor after that selection and press the backspace button on your keyboard. The incorrect selection will be removed. You can do the same thing with the role and the population group or you can leave them blank so you get all the data from all the village districts you selected.
After you have selected your choices, the Filter button will show you the results of your selection and / or the Export to CSV will export the data to a Comma-Separated Value file format for easy access with multiple outside programs, including Excel. Your selections remain on the screen for you to make changes if you wish or you want to start a new selection you can select the Reset button that appeared after filtering or exporting.
Now that you’re familiar with the Wage Data tool and how to use it, in the next issue we’ll build on this by working with the exported data in Excel. We’ll focus on ways to refine and filter your results so you can quickly find exactly what you’re looking for.