CLIFF Dashboard

Explore the CLIFF Dashboard and Planner


Cliff Dashboard

The CLIFF Dashboard is an interactive tool that depicts wages along numerous career pathways to show barriers residents and their families face as a result of the benefits cliff. The Dashboard gives the City of Fayetteville, its partners, workforce development organizations, and residents the ability to identify wage targets for a resident's unique situation. 

Explore the CLIFF Dashboard here

Powered by CLIFF


CLIFF Planner

The CLIFF Planner allows users to create individually customized career pathways while considering benefits, taxes and expenses over time and is intended for more granular career and financial counseling. 

Explore the CLIFF Planner here

Powered by CLIFF


What is a benefits CLIFF?

A benefits cliff is when career advancement puts residents and their families in a worse economic situation because of a loss of public assistance programs. The CLIFF Dashboard enables residents and their families' unique socioeconomic situation to be taken into account so that a target wage rate can be identified. This information is coupled with career pathway information for hundreds of occupations so that the tool can inform its users of pathways that can lead them to their identified wage rate. 


 Resources


Project Background and Purpose

During the planning process for the City of Fayetteville's next Economic Vitality Master Plan, a subcommittee focused on the economic mobility of residents who face barriers to employment. Following a great deal of discussion over the cliff effect and its consequences, staff began researching how it could show the real numbers behind an issue that many residents face.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's (FRBA) Advancing Careers for Low-Income Families initiative conducts research on benefits cliffs and develops tools to support community and state efforts to improve economic mobility for residents and their families. Staff identified that the CLIFF tool offered by the FRBA could provide multiple benefits:

  • Provide a robust and interactive tool that analyzes career pathway, cliff effect and unique socioeconomic data to aid in the development of the City's next Economic Vitality Master Plan; 
  • Enable the City and its partners to explore how this tool might be further adapted or refined to benefit our community.

On January 31, 2022, the City of Fayetteville signed a memorandum of understanding with FRBA to pilot the CLIFF Dashboard and CLIFF Planner in Fayetteville. The pilot period will conclude on December 31, 2022.