Welcome to Polco! In this article, we’re going to teach you how to navigate all the different features to ensure you are ready start engaging with your community. Fun fact! Our team hosts weekly product training sessions that you can pop into whenever you’d like additional assistance or are welcoming new staff into the fold. Because there are so many great details to cover, this tutorial will be broken down into sections in this article. If you’d like to access a full product training, you can access the registration link here!
You can also attend our weekly office hours for any questions or demo requests.
First, you’ll want to make sure you have been added to your Polco profile as an administrator. This should typically already be done for you, but if you are having issues logging in or setting up a password, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or email success@polco.us to receive support.
Once you have logged in, you can begin exploring the different sections and creating content!
ENGAGE: Participants Overview
In the Participants Overview, you’ll see a graph of your subscribers and the total number of responses over all time. For residents to become subscribers, they provide their email address and zip code. Optionally, they can provide their full name as well, which allows Polco to verify your residents against voter registration records. As you can continue to scroll down, you’ll see a map of the residence of your subscribers. Lastly, you’ll see a few demographic breakdowns, including race, age and gender. These demographics are gathered voluntarily from your residents. Overall, the Participants Overview (quick Loom tutorial) is a great set of visuals to see who you’re hearing from within your community!
ENGAGE: Content
In the Content section (quick Loom tutorial), you’ll find all pieces of content you and/or your team have created, no matter the stage the content is in (closed, draft, or actively published). This is also where you can create your own custom content from scratch! To do so, you’ll click the green ‘Create’ button in the upper-right-hand corner and pick which content type to build. From there, you can build out the summary section and content questions (see different question types to choose from). Once you’re done creating the content piece, you can either save as a draft or walk through the publishing settings. Finally, when the survey has closed, feel free to browse this tutorial on better understanding your results.
ENGAGE: Outreach
The Outreach section is incredibly important to advertise your survey efforts and boost your response rate over time! Polco has generate a longer URL to share to any and all communications methods your team uses, including your website, social media channels, flyers, etc. If you’re ever looking for more communications materials or recommendations, reach out to your Customer Success Manager (CSM) for some inspiration! Below the longer URL, you can create your own short URL to make it easier for your residents to remember and type. Make sure to share either URL (quick Loom tutorial) on your outreach channels to spread the word on all your live content!
ENGAGE: Polco Library
If you’re struggling to think of a topic or are just looking for some inspiration, Polco’s data science team has created more than 100 surveys to use as-is or customize to your community needs. You can search by topic or tag, and if you cannot find a topic you’re looking for, please reach out to your CSM. We are always looking for more topics to incorporate and make the Library as robust and useful for all customers. To use any of the Library surveys, simply click into the survey, ‘Save to Drafts’, and then ‘Edit & Publish’ in your Content section (quick Loom tutorial)!
ASSESS: Benchmark Reports
In the Assess module, you can find all your benchmark reports (quick Loom tutorial) and learn about the other benchmark surveys Polco has! You can select which survey you’d like to navigate to too review the survey questions or results. If you have specific questions regarding survey results, your CSM will be able to help connect you to the right resource. To learn more about Polco’s benchmark surveys, click here!
TRACK: Overview Dashboard
Powered by the GPAL partnership, Polco’s Track Module consolidates a variety of datasets and distills it into simple insights, so government leaders can focus on the most important and relevant factors in their community. The Track Module provides a full picture of local demographics and key performance metrics across all aspects of community livability, helping leaders measure performance without the hassle of manual tracking and guesswork.
The data you’ll see in the Track Module is a mixture of community statistics and resident opinion data from your most recently conducted iteration of The National Community Survey (The NCS), where applicable. Using both types of data side-by-side provides a comprehensive picture of your community’s strengths and challenges.
A key component of the Track Module is the Overview dashboard, which is available to all Polco users. This dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view of your municipality’s performance across six domains of community livability. Watch a quick video tour of the Overview dashboard here!
Polco’s Track Module also includes domain-specific dashboards available for purchase, which offer a deeper dive into specific areas such as safety, economy, and community health (among others). Reach out for more information or a quick demo today!
