Impostômetro: a country's tax collection, in real time

Context

Brazil's tax burden is argued about constantly and measured rarely. The IBPT (the Brazilian Institute of Planning and Taxation) held the data on what the three levels of government actually collect, but it reached the public as periodic reports that almost nobody outside the tax profession read.

Problem

A number published quarterly in a report cannot move a public conversation. To make tax collection legible to an ordinary citizen it had to be continuous, visible, hard to ignore and solid enough that a national newspaper would quote it without checking it first.

Approach

The Impostômetro counts, live, the taxes collected in Brazil by the union, the states and the municipalities, and publishes the figure on the web, on social media and on physical panels, so it is always current and always citable. I co-authored the project through Agência da Internet, the agency I founded; later, as Digital Planning Director at the IBPT, I ran the institutional communication and the creation and upkeep of the institute's public-interest sites, this one among them.

Non-obvious decisions

• Publish continuously instead of periodically. A real-time counter gets quoted; a quarterly report gets filed.
• Treat the press as the distribution channel, not as the audience. The counter was designed to be embedded, screenshotted and quoted, which is what made it a daily reference rather than a campaign with an end date.
• Keep the object single-purpose. The Impostômetro answers one question: how much has been collected so far. The IBPT's later public-interest tools, Lupa no Imposto and Empresômetro among them, shipped as separate products rather than as sections of it.

Outcome

The Impostômetro became a nationally recognised project with daily media coverage, and the pattern spawned a family of public-interest data products at the institute. I co-authored it; since launch the project has reached more than 150 million people worldwide, more than 10 million of them on Facebook alone, with 3 million page views a month and over 500,000 citations across the internet. It is still online.