One framework for evaluating how municipalities operate and improve over time.
Data from:
The Civic Impact Score (CiS) turns scattered 311 data into one 0–100 number, built the same way for every tracked city.
See the full methodologyThe same benchmark, read differently depending on who's using it.
See where your tax dollars are actually going, and whether the systems they fund are getting better or falling further behind.
An additional intelligence layer for evaluating municipal risk, operational efficiency, and long-term resilience.
Identify infrastructure gaps, compare municipalities, and prioritize where targeted investment is needed most.
Benchmark municipalities, support budget planning, and monitor improvement over time against an external standard.
Standardized municipal performance data for comparing regions and studying how infrastructure and governance interact.
Identify communities with measurable needs and evaluate whether funded initiatives are producing real outcomes.
The Civic Intelligence Terminal is where the benchmark becomes explorable. Interactive maps, scores, charts, and data layers let you see how municipalities compare, where risks are emerging, and how efficiency changes over time.
How efficient is compared to ?
Enter the terminal to compare municipalities, evaluate infrastructure, understand efficiency scores, and explore the data behind the benchmark.
Every number on this Terminal is real, live data pulled directly from each city's public 311 system. Below is how the Civic Impact Score is built, what it measures, and who uses it.
Municipal infrastructure health has no standard unit. A pothole backlog in Austin and a streetlight backlog in Chicago are never compared, because nothing forces them onto the same scale.
Every city publishes service request data. Almost no one turns it into a number a resident, journalist, or investor can actually use.
Foundations, infrastructure funds, and municipal bond analysts have no standardized signal for which cities are actually improving.
A resident can see their own city's backlog. They have no way to see whether it's getting better, worse, or how it stacks up nationally.
The Civic Impact Score (CiS) is a composite 0–100 measurement of municipal infrastructure health, built entirely from live 311 data across five weighted factors. Every city on this Terminal is scored the same way, so a city's number means the same thing everywhere.
How long currently open cases have sat unresolved. Older backlogs score lower.
What share of requests actually get closed, not just filed.
Requests per capita, so a small city and a mega-city are judged on equal footing.
Whether the backlog is spread evenly across neighborhoods, or concentrated in a few.
The fifth factor, Momentum (10%), tracks the week-over-week trend in each city's open caseload — the signal behind every Improving / Stable / Deteriorating label on this Terminal. Every city here is scored on the same time window, so comparisons are apples to apples, not an artifact of one city having more historical data than another.
If a city doesn't have enough distinct tagged locations to measure real geographic spread, Geographic Equity is dropped from that city's score entirely, and the remaining four weights renormalize to sum to 100% — rather than scoring Equity as zero in place, which would understate the city's real number. This is flagged directly on the affected city's page. The formula itself, including this exception, computes live from each city's sub-scores in this page's own source rather than being a stored value, so it can be checked by hand from the numbers shown above.
Each city page also shows a separate figure, CiS incl. Shelter Coverage: 85% the CiS above, 15% each city's HUD Point-in-Time sheltered rate, linearly interpolated between official annual counts so it doesn't jump once a year. This second number is additive, not a silent replacement — sort order and every other CiS figure on the site stay on the original five-factor formula. Shelter coverage is also shaped by climate and local right-to-shelter law, not service quality alone, so we show it alongside the primary score rather than folded invisibly into it.
The platform seeks to quantify how effectively municipalities maintain, improve, and prepare their infrastructure over time. This Terminal is the visible part — underneath it is the methodology that produces the score, the historical record that makes a trend meaningful, and the benchmarking layer that lets one city's number mean something next to another's.
A public, fixed formula, documented above, applied the same way to every tracked city.
CiS itself — one number, 0 to 100, built from live 311 data.
Backlog, resolution speed, geographic equity, and momentum, broken out by category and neighborhood.
Every score is a snapshot in a series — what makes Improving / Stable / Deteriorating mean something over time, not just today.
The same formula across every city is what makes cross-city comparison — like the category rankings above — possible at all.
Civic Impact Index is built to be the official metric for city-wide infrastructure efficiency — read differently by each group below, but built from the same underlying data.
See how your city's infrastructure efficiency compares to any other city we track.
Direct capital toward cities facing the most acute infrastructure risk from sea-level rise and other climate pressures.
Operational efficiency as a leading indicator, ahead of the next credit rating review.
Give to the cities and categories with the most verifiable, documented need.
A pre-vetted, scored pipeline of infrastructure projects to bid into.
An external, apples-to-apples benchmark for operational health, independent of self-reported metrics.
Civic Impact Index is a nonprofit measurement organization: no brokering capital, no cut of donations, no contractor leads sold. The score and its methodology are the only product.
The Civic Impact Score and this Terminal are free to view for every resident, journalist, and researcher, for every tracked city.
Deeper historical data, additional cities, and API access for foundations, funds, and municipal governments sustain the organization.
The scoring formula is public and consistent. No city can pay to improve its score, and none of the weighting changes by request.
The underlying 311 data is public. What compounds is a track record of consistent, unbiased scoring, applied the same way to every city, every time.
A score only means something in comparison. Nine cities is a start; fifty makes the standard real.
As the comparison set grows, foundations and analysts have more reason to rely on the score as a real signal.
Institutional subscriptions fund expansion into new cities and deeper historical data.
Which starts the cycle again, at greater scale.
The score gets more valuable as the map fills in.
If your city publishes 311 or equivalent service request data, we can add it to the Terminal. There's no cost, no approval process to influence the score, and no way to opt out of unfavorable results once you're in — the same rules apply to every tracked city.
The public Terminal shows the current score and recent trend for every tracked city. Institutional access adds full historical data, category-level detail, and API access — for capital allocation research, credit analysis, or academic study.
Whether you're a potential donor, a government partner, or just curious about the data — we want to hear from you.
Connect your Tally form ID to activate.
Anchor donors, government partners, and pilot city candidates — this is where the first project cycle begins.
—