Case Study: Village Earth achieves accurate tribal household mapping and increased HUD funding with Fulcrum

Empowering Tribes to Collect Their Own Census Data

Village Earth, a 501(c)(3) based at Colorado State University, has provided technical support and housing surveys to American Indian Tribes for over a decade and led the Dakota Housing Needs Assessment across five reservations. They confronted chronic data challenges—missing household inventories, inconsistent addressing and unmarked roads—that produced undercounts in Federal Census data and made it difficult to create a complete, statistically valid household sampling frame.

To solve this, Village Earth moved from GPS/map books and paper surveys to tablet-based digital collection using Fulcrum, preloading household locations and offline basemaps and using features like color-coded markers, record assignment, parent–child records and a web management interface. The shift delivered real-time quality control, faster supervision of a 50+ member field crew across five reservations, reduced transcription errors and lower costs, and produced higher-quality data for tribes to use in census challenges and funding allocation decisions.

Village Earth