Community Livability Snapshot

The Community Livability Snapshot is a free offering to all Polco users designed to provide actionable insights into each community’s greatest strengths and needs. The Community Livability Snapshot (CLS), located within Polco’s Assess module, integrates extensive datasets from our GPAL partnership and proprietary data analysis techniques. With the CLS, you can steer strategic initiatives, optimize budget allocations, and involve residents in the decision-making process.

The CLS features a quality-importance matrix informed by both resident sentiment and publicly available community statistics (collected and synthesized by GPAL). The placement of each domain on the matrix helps community leaders identify which facets of livability either need attention or are performing well, based on their corresponding importance and quality ratings. In addition to the graph itself, there’s a legend to help administrators easily see which facets are on track, need attention, or are in possible excess (and thus, may be candidates for reducing resource allocation). 

Clicking on a specific facet of livability will bring up some additional resources for that domain. Explore those suggestions to choose whichever next step is right for your community.

FAQs!

How should a community leader use the CLS?

This can vary! The CLS is first and foremost a way to see how your community is performing, indicate which areas need improvement, and ideally work on enhancing those facets of livability. As a starting point, we recommend following the suggestions for improvement on areas that need attention—just click into each domain on the graph to find these. Additionally, you can explore more in-depth data points for each area using the Track module. If you’re interested in diving deeper into a specific domain, please let your CSM know, and we can work on providing you with access to those additional insights.

Where does the CLS data come from? 

By default, the CLS calculates domain placements using both publicly available community statistics from GPAL and Polco’s national database of resident opinion. For communities that have conducted an NCS or another benchmark survey (including the NCS-S) with Polco since 2020, those results are used in place of the national database for resident sentiment, offering more personalized results.

Can I share this graph with my team and/or on public forums?

Yes! Feel free to share with any stakeholders you’d like. In fact, you can download the graph right from the Polco site (shown in screenshot below) and share as a Content Post on Polco, so your subscribers can be included in understanding community performance. This kind of transparency is a great way to build public trust and community engagement overall.