Case Study: Precision Analytics Group achieves automated weekly COVID-19 hunger tracking and actionable insights with Alteryx

Automatic Charting of Weekly Covid-19 Hunger Data from the Census Bureau

Precision Analytics Group used Alteryx to analyze the Census Bureau’s weekly Household Pulse Survey Excel workbooks to track pandemic-related food insecurity. The data posed a challenge: each geographic unit was a separate worksheet with inconsistent and repeating row labels, weekly files with week numbers in filenames, and noisy week‑to‑week counts, making it difficult to quickly produce reliable trend charts and demographic breakdowns for funders and aid planners.

The team built two Alteryx workflows — “Newly Hungry” and “Hunger by age and race” — that use Dynamic Input, sheet-name extraction, text parsing, multi-row date generation, and chained filters to standardize and merge all weekly workbooks automatically. Outputs include per-MSA and composite interactive charts with four-week rolling averages; the automated pipelines ingest new weekly files without modification, enable rapid reporting to funders, and reveal that younger people and Black and Hispanic/Latino populations experienced the greatest increases in hunger while older groups were least affected.

Precision Analytics Group

David Gump

Senior Analytics Architect