The data in Polco’s Track dashboards comes from Government Performance Action and Learning (GPAL), a collaboration of public, private, and academic partners who distill data into simple insights for government leaders. GPAL consolidates extensive data from public records, private research efforts, and proprietary sources into a single comprehensive dataset. This data populates the Track insight dashboards curated for your local community.
Types of Data
Polco’s Track dashboards showcase multiple types of data:
- Community statistics: Secondary data from public sources (e.g., the U.S. Census, CDC, ACS, etc.). Most community statistics in the dashboard are considered indicators—monitorable outcomes that provide insight into overall community livability—but a few are community demographics or characteristics (e.g., median age, population, etc.).
- Resident sentiment: Community members’ opinions and perceptions, collected during the community’s most recently conducted benchmark survey (such as The National Community Survey) with Polco.
- Index scores: Calculated variables that are based on both community statistics and resident sentiment data.
- Benchmark comparisons: Your community’s score relative to other like communities across the nation (default), within your state (optional), and/or of similar population size (optional).
These dashboards feature hundreds of data points categorized by domain, enabling you to hone in on the specific factors most relevant to your community. A sampling of these data points includes:
- Number of unhoused individuals
- Broadband access
- Power outage frequency
- Water quality
- Voter registration and turnout
- Frequency and risk score of natural disasters like flooding, drought, tornado, etc.
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- Violent crime rate
- Average life expectancy
- Walkability index score
- Food insecurity rate
- Percent of households using SNAP benefits
- Annual job growth
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Data Sources
The GPAL dataset will continue to grow as new partners join the effort. Currently, the resident sentiment data is sourced from Polco’s own database of resident opinion, gathered from conducting benchmark surveys (such as The National Community Survey) in hundreds of communities across the nation.
The community statistics data are compiled from these sources:
- U.S. Census
- American Community Survey
- Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates
- The Government Finance Database (Census of governments)
- Uniform Crime Reports
- Bureau of Labor Statistics (myriad surveys)
- Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System
- National Center for Health Statistics (natality files, mortality files)
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- CDC PLACES: Local Data for Better Health
- County Health Rankings
- Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Risk Index
- Department of Housing and Urban Development
- Energy Information Administration
- Environmental Protection Agency
- National Center for Education Statistics (Common Core of Data)
- Stanford Education Data Archive
- The Marshall Project
- and more!
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Data Coverage
As of November 2023, there are 70,387 total geographic entities included in the GPAL dataset. This number includes the following location types:
- 50 states
- 3,142 counties
- 31,567 places (cities, towns, villages)
- 35,628 county subdivisions
Data Usage
This collection of curated, actionable data empowers planners, city managers, area agencies on aging, law enforcement leaders, public works, and other government agencies to make decisions that improve community livability and quality of life. Polco’s Track Module helps local governments more easily monitor their community’s performance and create effective strategic plans, strengthen applications for grant funding, align elected officials with staff, prepare for council retreats, and make decisions on where to allocate resources. In addition, these dashboards assist municipalities faced with tough decisions regarding the current housing crisis, economic downturn, and increasingly extreme weather conditions.