Purpose of Article:

This article goes over how to use the Related Content functionality of the Open Budget and Open Checkbook products to effectively add context to different sections of your budget or financial data. This article assumes some familiarity with the Admin panel, and that the user has the proper permissions to be editing the Open Budget or Open Checkbook site.

This Article will cover:

• How to use related content
• Where related content appears on the site
• Accessing the Related Content page in the Admin Panel
• Adding Related Content

What Is Related Content?

Related Content cards can be configured for your homepage as well as with various parts of your drill-down hierarchy. On the homepage, the related content cards display at the very bottom of the page:

For the purposes of this article, we will be navigating related content for the Expenses module of Open Budget; however, you should note that you may add related content to each of the modules of your Open Budget site.

Accessing the Related Content Page of the Admin Panel

To reach the admin panel, log in at admin.finance.socrata.com and navigate to the site instance you would like to add related content to. Related Content will be the last tab option on the left-hand side of the page.

Adding a Related Content Card

Types of Related Content Cards

When you add a Related Content Card, you have the option to choose from three different Types:

1. Raw: this is the most flexible card, and also the most manual. If you select this, you will need to fill in the URL, Image, Text, Title, and Link Text fields in the admin panel. This might be used for press coverage, community events, etc.
2. Goal: choosing this type of card will automatically pull information from a Data & Insights-created goal into your finance module. You only need to fill out the URL and Link Text fields, and the rest of the fields will be automatically populated based on the goal itself.
3. Story: choosing this type of card will automatically pull information from a Data & Insights-created story into your finance module.You only need to fill out the URL and Link Text fields, and the rest of the fields will be automatically populated based on the goal itself.

For Homepage

Homepage related content cards are straightforward: they appear at the bottom of the page and do not need to be mapped to any specific column or hierarchy from the underlying dataset.

For module pages (i.e. Expense, Revenue, Capital Budget)

To add related content, you will want to map out where you would like it to show up within your site by tracing the hierarchy drill down. In the Related Content configuration tab, the API Field Name maps back to the columns in your underlying dataset (and therefore to the hierarchy you demarcated when you initially set up the module of the site). Once you’ve selected an item from this drop down tool, the Entity Name drop down tool will populate with all of the items grouped under that column (once you’ve selected the bucket, it will show you all of the things in the bucket). This indicates the page your related content card will show on. For example, in this walkthrough image below. I’ve selected the “service” bucket in the API Field Name column, and “Public Safety” as the Entity Name. When I add my related content in the URL field, I expect the Public Safety page in the Expenses module to show my content card.

In this case, we added four Related Content cards to the Public Safety page, and they are all Goals created on the Data & Insights platform, so we automatically read in the goal content into the cards.

Always remember to save your changes regularly by clicking “Save Changes” at the top of the page!