About the journey

The maturity journey

Each dimension, and the experience overall, is described with one of four maturity labels. A label describes a current stage and a starting point for improvement — it is not a grade, and it is never a comparison with other municipalities.

A two-part journey

The Municipal Data Experience has two parts. Step one is the outside-in review: we look at your public-facing data the way a resident or elected leader would — budgets, financial reports, dashboards, maps, meeting materials — using only what is publicly available, with no effort required from your team.

Step two is the internal perspective, gathered through the Internal Data Storytelling Assessment: a short, five-minute set of statements completed by the people who produce the data and reporting. People from different departments can each contribute.

The outside-in review shows what residents and elected leaders can find, understand and use from publicly available information. The internal perspective helps explain the people, processes, definitions and effort behind that experience.

Together, they reveal where the two perspectives align, where they differ, and where focused improvements could create the most value — the Combined Municipal Data Experience.

How the perspectives come together

The outside and internal perspectives remain distinct. They are brought together dimension by dimension to reveal where the public experience aligns with — or differs from — the internal experience.

Each perspective uses the same five dimensions: Story Quality, Story Access, Story Trust, Story Reuse and Story Efficiency. The combined experience highlights strengths, gaps and opportunities without hiding meaningful differences behind a single average.

Because departments can experience data differently, we preserve those differences as patterns and ranges for analysis — never as personal grades for individual staff.

What we can — and can't — see from the outside

The outside-in review is built entirely from public materials, so it can speak to what a resident finds and understands, but not to how the work is produced. Story Efficiency — staff hours, handoffs, and manual rebuild effort — cannot be reliably assessed from public materials, so it is left to the internal perspective.

Story Reuse is partly visible from the outside: published formats and interactive experiences show how reusable the public-facing data is. But internal reuse — shared data sources, consistent definitions, and reporting processes — can only be confirmed through staff validation.

This is exactly why the two parts exist: each sees what the other cannot.

Platform-neutral and future-ready

This experience does not advocate for any specific technology platform, vendor, or product. It is designed to start a useful conversation about how your organization turns trusted data into accessible public stories — regardless of the tools you use today.

Consistent definitions, trusted sources and reusable data do more than improve today's reporting. They also create a stronger foundation for future analytics and AI-assisted experiences.

Privacy

Your responses are private. They are accessed only by the team conducting this initiative and are not shared publicly.

Your municipality will never be publicly identified, ranked or compared. Any future benchmarking would be anonymous and opt-in.

Each result page is reachable only through the private link generated when the assessment was completed. We recommend saving that link.

No public ranking

There is no public leaderboard and no municipal ranking. Each maturity label is an absolute read on its own terms — never a comparison against other communities. This work is designed to learn with local governments, not to grade them.