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How the Platform is Structured
Polco is organized around four interconnected modules: Track (Data & Insights), Engage (Engagement Tools), Assess (Benchmark Surveys), and Polco AI (AI Assistants). Each module can be used on its own, but the real power of the platform comes from using them together — where data informs engagement, surveys validate data, and AI connects it all in real time.
This article walks through what each module does, where to find it in the platform, and how the pieces work together as a unified system.
The Admin Platform Navigation
When you log into the Polco Admin Platform, the left-hand navigation panel is your entry point to every module. You'll see:
- Polco AI — Access to AI assistants (Polly, Grace, and others)
- Engagement — Polls, surveys, content posts, live events, simulations, engagement pages, benchmark surveys, and more
- Track Data — Community performance dashboards powered by GPAL, plus Community Disparity
- Account — Profile settings, plan management, and org configuration
Each section expands into sub-pages as you use it. The platform also has a persistent "Ask Polly AI" button on the right side of the screen — so your AI assistant is available no matter which module you're working in.
Module 1: Track — Data & Insights
What it is: Track is Polco's community performance management system, powered by the GPAL (Government Performance Action Lab) database. It gives local governments a continuously updated, benchmarked view of how their community is performing across every major area of livability.
What you'll find there:
- Community Livability Snapshot — A high-level matrix showing how your community scores across all domains, plotted by both performance quality and resident-rated importance
- Overview Dashboard — A consolidated view of index scores across all 10 livability domains in one place
- Domain Dashboards — Detailed views for each domain: Economy, Safety, Housing & Community Design, Health & Wellness, Education Arts & Culture, Mobility, Natural Environment, Parks & Recreation, Utilities, Finance, and Community Connection
- Data Sources — A reference page showing where each indicator comes from (Census, CDC, BLS, EPA, etc.)
How it works: Each domain dashboard displays a Domain Index Score (out of 100), benchmarked against other communities nationwide. You can filter by your community or comparison groups, toggle between GPAL standard data and GPAL for Older Adults, and compare against nationwide averages, similar population size, your state, or similar communities in your state.
Where it lives in the admin nav: Track Data → Community Livability / Overview / Data Dashboards / Data Sources
Key term: GPAL (Government Performance Action Lab) is the national data consortium co-founded by Polco with Stanford, UW-Madison, and ICMA. It unifies 400+ public data sources — Census, BLS, CDC, EPA, HUD, BEA, FEMA, and more — into a single structured database that powers all Track dashboards.
Module 2: Engage — Engagement Tools
What it is: Engage is where you create, publish, and manage public-facing engagement activities — everything from a quick 30-second poll to a full multi-phase project with surveys, simulations, live events, and content posts.
What you'll find there:
- Create Content — The starting point for building any new engagement item. Content types include:
- Polls — Short, focused questions for quick resident opinions
- Surveys — Multi-question instruments for in-depth structured feedback
- Content Posts — Updates, announcements, and reports published to the resident feed
- Live Events — Real-time polling during town halls, workshops, or virtual meetings
- Engagement Pages — Project hubs that organize related polls, surveys, posts, and simulations in one place, helping residents follow and participate in a specific initiative end to end
- Prioritizations — Ranked-choice or point-allocation activities for strategic planning
- Simulations — Interactive budget, housing, and policy trade-off tools
- Taxpayer Receipts — Transparent breakdowns of how tax dollars are spent
- View Content — A full list of all published and draft content, filterable by type (surveys, polls, posts, live events, simulations, receipts, prioritizations)
- Saved Data Points — Bookmarked indicators from Track dashboards, shareable and embeddable in posts
- Outreach — Tools for managing email campaigns, resident panel invitations, and distribution lists
- Library — Pre-built survey templates, poll questions, and outreach copy ready to customize and publish
- Resident Panel — Your registered resident list, including panel management and demographic tracking
Where it lives in the admin nav: Engagement → (all sub-sections listed above)
Who sees this content: Everything published through Engage appears on the resident-facing Polco platform, where community members can view, respond to, and follow the projects their local government has published.
Module 3: Assess — Benchmark Surveys
What it is: Benchmark surveys are accessed directly within the Engagement section of the admin nav, under Benchmark Surveys. They are administered by NRC (National Research Center) — Polco's research and thought leadership arm. NRC brings 30+ years of government survey science expertise and maintains the largest resident opinion benchmark database in the United States.
Where it lives in the admin nav: Engagement → Benchmark Surveys
What you'll find there:
- Benchmark Surveys — The full list of available surveys your organization has ordered or can explore:
- NCS — National Community Survey™: Resident satisfaction across livability domains with national benchmarks
- CASOA — Community Assessment Survey for Older Adults™: Focused on adults 55+, covering housing, healthcare, transportation, and social services
- NBS — National Business Survey™: Business community feedback on economic climate, workforce, and policy support
- NES — National Employee Survey™: Government employee engagement, satisfaction, and organizational culture
- NLES — National Law Enforcement Survey™: Resident perceptions of public safety and law enforcement effectiveness
- NES-LE — National Employee Survey — Law Enforcement: Internal law enforcement staff morale and workplace culture
- NCS-S — National Community Survey Snapshot: A streamlined, faster-deployment version of the NCS
- Community Disparity — A specialized view for understanding equity and access gaps across population groups
How it works: When your organization has conducted a benchmark survey, its results appear in this section and can be accessed via the survey list. From there you can view the full report, access the manage content controls, and see how results connect to Track dashboards. If you haven't yet ordered a survey, each survey card includes options to view a demo report, learn more about methodology, or request information to get started.
How it connects to Track: Benchmark survey results — particularly NCS data — layer directly into Track dashboards. Where GPAL provides objective performance indicators, the NCS provides the resident sentiment layer: how residents perceive safety, the quality of parks, the local economy, and more. Together, they give you both the hard data and the community voice in one view.
Module 4: Polco AI — AI Assistants
What it is: Polco AI is the home of Polco's artificial intelligence assistants. Rather than being a single tool, it's a suite of purpose-built agents — each trained on public sector knowledge and designed for specific government workflows.
What you'll find there:
- Polly (Data Analyst) — The primary AI assistant available to all admin users. Polly can answer questions about your community's performance data, pull GPAL indicators, help analyze survey results, draft reports, summarize metrics, and support grant research. Polly is also accessible via a persistent slide-out panel on the right side of every page in the admin platform.
- Grace (Grant Writer) — A specialized AI assistant for grant writing. Grace helps draft needs statements, program narratives, budget justifications, and executive summaries for grant applications, drawing on GPAL community data to ground language in verified local statistics.
- Clara (Permit Review Agent) — An AI agent governments can add to their public-facing website. Clara knows applicable codes and permit requirements, reviews resident applications, and provides iterative feedback — so applications arrive to staff nearly complete rather than triggering rounds of email corrections.
- Bobbi (Budget Writer) — A budget writing AI currently in development. Bobbi will help government teams write budgets including Priority-Based Budgeting (PBB) and Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) frameworks.
- Institutional Knowledge Agent (beta) — Helps government offices capture, organize, and make internal staff knowledge searchable and accessible, preserving expertise that would otherwise walk out the door.
- Resident Customer Service Agent (beta) — A resident-facing agent that can be embedded on a government's website to help community members navigate the site and get answers to common questions around the clock.
- AI Session History — A log of past AI conversations, so you can pick up where you left off or reference prior analysis sessions.
How it connects to everything else: Polly's greatest strength is its connection to the rest of the platform. You can ask Polly questions while you're looking at a Track dashboard, and it will interpret the indicators for you. You can ask it to pull data relevant to a grant Grace is drafting. You can upload your own files — strategic plans, budget documents, local reports — and have Polly analyze them alongside GPAL data. The AI layer is designed to sit across all four modules, not just in one corner of the platform.
Where it lives in the admin nav: Polco AI (top of the left navigation) + persistent "Ask Polly AI" panel available on every page
How the Modules Connect
The modules are designed to reinforce each other. Here are the most common ways they work together in practice:
Track + Engage Spot a declining indicator in your Track dashboard — say, a drop in walkability scores — then launch a resident survey through Engage to understand why and what changes they want to see. The objective data and the resident voice inform each other.
Assess + Track Run the National Community Survey and have the results automatically layer into your Track dashboards. Now your Economy domain doesn't just show BLS unemployment data — it also shows what percentage of residents rate the local economy as excellent or good. Hard data and resident perception, side by side.
Track + Engage + Simulations Use a short poll to surface the budget issues residents care most about, then direct them to a budget simulation where they can explore the trade-offs firsthand. The poll surfaces priorities; the simulation builds understanding and generates structured feedback.
Polly AI + All Modules Polly sits across everything. Ask it to summarize your Track indicators before a council presentation. Have it find relevant GPAL data points while Grace is drafting a grant narrative. Ask it to interpret your NCS results without having to dig through the full report manually.
Grace AI + Assess + Track Grace pulls from both benchmark survey results and GPAL data when drafting grant narratives. A needs statement for an infrastructure grant, for example, might cite your community's Mobility domain index score alongside resident sentiment data from the NCS — all in one AI-assisted draft.
Related Articles
- What is Polco?
- Admin vs. Resident interfaces
- Navigating the admin dashboard
- Introduction to Track
- Engagement tools overview
- Benchmark surveys overview
- AI tools overview
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Each module works independently. Many organizations start with just one — often Engage for resident surveys, or Track for data dashboards — and add additional modules over time. Your Polco subscription tier determines which modules and features are available to your organization.
The admin dashboard's left-hand navigation is the best starting point. If your goal is to understand your community's data, start with Track Data. If you want to run a survey or poll, go to Engagement → Create Content. If you have a benchmark survey to review, go to Engagement → Benchmark Surveys. And if you want a quick orientation at any point, open the Polly AI assistant and ask it to walk you through what's available.
Engage surveys are custom instruments you build yourself for specific local topics — anything from a parks satisfaction poll to a neighborhood planning survey. They're flexible, fast to deploy, and give you direct resident feedback on whatever you want to ask.
Assess benchmark surveys (NCS, NBS, CASOA, etc.) are professionally designed, statistically validated instruments administered by NRC. They use probability-based sampling to ensure representative results and compare your community against hundreds of jurisdictions nationwide. They take more time to deploy but deliver a higher level of scientific credibility and national context.
Most organizations use both: benchmark surveys for periodic, high-stakes measurement and Engage surveys for ongoing, issue-specific feedback.
Yes. Track dashboards are populated with GPAL data — national, publicly sourced indicators from Census, CDC, BLS, EPA, and other trusted agencies — regardless of whether your organization has conducted an NCS or other survey. However, some sections of the dashboard will show "data unavailable" for resident sentiment indicators until a benchmark survey is completed, since those require actual survey responses from your community.
Yes. The "Ask Polly AI" button appears persistently on the right side of the admin interface and opens a slide-out panel where you can ask data questions without leaving your current page. There's also a full-screen Polly session available from the Polco AI section in the main navigation, which is better suited for longer conversations and deeper analysis work.
GPAL (Government Performance Action Lab) is the data consortium that aggregates, standardizes, and curates data from 400+ national sources. Polco's team — in partnership with Stanford, UW-Madison, and ICMA — continuously ingests and updates that data, which populates the Track domain dashboards. As an admin user, you don't import or manage GPAL data directly; it's maintained by Polco and updated on a rolling basis (typically quarterly for most indicators).
Yes. Polco supports a BYOD (Bring Your Own Data) feature that allows you to upload local datasets — budget documents, strategic plans, local reports, GIS exports — into the platform. Once uploaded, Polly can analyze that data alongside GPAL indicators, and you can reference it in your AI-assisted conversations and grant writing sessions.
Yes, when your organization has completed a benchmark survey like the NCS, those results are layered into the relevant Track domain dashboards. Resident sentiment indicators — like the percentage of residents who rate community safety as excellent or good — appear alongside the GPAL objective data indicators in the same domain view. This gives you both the data and the community voice in one place.
They're the same Polly assistant — the difference is just the interface. The full-page view (accessible from Polco AI in the main nav) gives you more screen space for longer sessions, file uploads, and extended analysis conversations. The side drawer (the persistent "Ask Polly AI" button) lets you ask quick questions without leaving whatever page you're on — useful for looking something up mid-dashboard or while reviewing a survey result. Both sessions are saved in your AI Session History.
Yes. Polco supports multi-user organizations with role-based access controls. Admins can assign different permission levels — controlling who can create and publish content, who can view data, and who has full administrative access. Multiple users can work in the platform simultaneously without interfering with each other's work.