MapAgora Dashboard

Welcome to the MapAgora Dashboard, an interactive site that visualizes the availability, composition, and equity of civic opportunities across U.S. counties. This dashboard is part of the Mapping the Modern Agora project, hosted at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which systematically measures civic infrastructure using large-scale administrative and digital trace data.

Motivation ๐Ÿš€

Today, most people are disconnected from the democratic processes that allow us to engage, deliberate, and make decisions together. Civil society organizations are scattered, and opportunities for meaningful civic participation are often inaccessible.

Weโ€™re mapping the modern agora โ€” a visual map of where and how people can engage with each other in the democratic process. By mapping civic opportunities, we aim to strengthen democracy by identifying areas that need more attention and support.

๐Ÿ“Š Civic Opportunity Dataset Construction ๐Ÿ› 

To create our datasets on the landscape of civic opportunity in America, we begin with the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File โ€” a comprehensive registry of all tax-exempt organizations in the U.S. This registry serves as our sampling frame and includes a broad range of nonprofit entities, even those that donโ€™t file annual tax returns.

Next, we link IRS administrative records with data scraped directly from organization websites. Using a combination of machine learning and natural language processing, we identify the type of each organization and whether it provides civic opportunities such as volunteering, membership, public events, and engaging in civic or political action.

The resulting datasets cover over 1.7 million de-identified nonprofits and are aggregated at the ZIP code and county levels. Each county is scored along a five-point Civic Opportunity Index, with additional indicators for organizational composition and community demographics.

About This Dashboard

This dashboard presents only a subset of the full MapAgora datasets. It includes:

  • County-level aggregates of civic opportunity counts and organizational types
  • Interactive visualizations of these county-level measures

Explore the Dashboard

  • ๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ Interactive Map: View county-level civic opportunity scores, see how each place ranks, and examine the types of organizations driving civic access.
  • ๐Ÿ“‹ Interactive Table: Search, filter, and sort civic opportunity indicators across all U.S. counties, with comparisons to state and national benchmarks.

โš ๏ธ Important Note

It does not include either the full de-identified organization-level dataset of 1.7M+ nonprofits ๐Ÿข or the ZIP codeโ€“level aggregates ๐Ÿ“ฎ. This dashboard is limited to county-level data only ๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ.

For ZIP-level data and detailed metadata on individual organizations, please refer to the full data release ๐Ÿ“‚.

Data Access and Paper

  • Dataset 1: organization-level dataset of de-identified nonprofit organizations (1,774,798 rows \(\times\) 17 columns)
Data descriptions

This dataset includes 1,774,798 de-identified nonprofit organizations. To protect privacy and reduce the risk of misinterpretation, all identifying information (e.g., organization names and EINs) is removed.

Each observation includes:

  • Unique identifier:
    • id: a row index used for reference; contains no identifying information.
  • Geographic identifiers:
    • state: two-letter state abbreviation
    • city: city name listed in the IRS record
    • FIPS: county FIPS code
    • ZCTA: ZIP Code Tabulation Area
  • Civic opportunity indicators:
    • membership, volunteer, events, take_action: binary variables indicating whether the organization provides each type of civic opportunity (1 = provides the opportunity; 0 = does not provide it or information is unavailable)
    • opp_binary: equals 1 if the organization provides at least one civic opportunity; 0 otherwise
    • opp_mean: the mean of the four civic opportunity binary indicators
  • Organizational type:
    • predicted: machine-learned classification of the organization (e.g., religious, political, professional)
  • Address metadata:
    • is_po: indicates whether the organization lists a P.O. Box as its mailing address (1 = yes, 0 = no)
    • grouping_value: an anonymized internal identifier used to track federated organizations (e.g., national networks with local chapters)
  • Financial attributes:
    • asset_amt: total assets
    • income_amt: total income
    • revenue_amt: total revenue
  • Datasets 2-3: Aggregated civic opportunity counts at the county (3,281 rows \(\times\) 24 columns) and ZIP code levels (30,988 rows \(\times\) 24 columns)
Data descriptions

Derived from Dataset 1, this dataset aggregates civic opportunity indicators and socioeconomic characteristics at the ZIP code (ZCTA) and county levels. Each observation corresponds to a geographic unit and includes counts of civic opportunity types, a composite score and index, normalized indicators, and contextual variables from the American Community Survey (ACS).

Each observation includes:

  • Geographic identifiers:
    • state: two-letter state abbreviation
    • FIPS: county FIPS code
    • ZCTA: ZIP Code Tabulation Area
  • Organizational counts:
    • n: total nonprofit organizations
    • civic_org_sum: total civic opportunity organizations
    • membership_sum: total organizations providing membership opportunities
    • volunteer_sum: total organizations providing volunteer opportunities
    • events_sum: total organizations providing public event opportunities
    • take_action_sum: total organizations providing political or civic action opportunities
  • Composite civic opportunity scores:
    • civic_opp_sum: total opportunity score
  • Normalized civic opportunity indicators (per capita):
    • civic_org_sum_normalized: total number of civic organizations per capita
    • civic_opp_sum_normalized: total civic opportunities per capita
    • civic_opp_index: quintile-based civic opportunity index, derived by dividing civic_opp_sum_normalized into five equal-sized bins
    • membership_sum_normalized: total number of organizations providing membership opportunities per capita
    • volunteer_sum_normalized: total number of organizations providing volunteer opportunities per capita
    • events_sum_normalized: total number of organizations providing public event opportunities per capita
    • take_action_sum_normalized: total number of organizations providing political or civic action opportunities per capita
  • Sociodemographic indicators:
    • TotalPopulation: total population
    • POV150: poverty rate
    • SNGPNT: single-parent households
    • BROAD: households without broadband access
    • NOHSDP: adults without a high school diploma
    • UNEMP: unemployment rate
    • REMNRTY: share of racial or ethnic minority residents
  • Datasets 4-5: Aggregated organizational type breakdowns at the county (29,687 rows \(\times\) 5 columns) and ZIP code levels (150,162 rows \(\times\) 5 columns)
Data descriptions

Also derived from Dataset 1, this dataset summarizes the types of organizations that provide civic opportunities at the ZIP code and county levels. Each observation corresponds to a unique geography-organization type pair and enables analysis of regional patterns in the composition of civic infrastructure.

Each observation includes:

  • Geographic identifiers:
    • FIPS: county FIPS code
    • ZCTA: ZIP Code Tabulation Area
  • Organizational counts:
    • n: number of civic opportunity-providing organizations of a given type in the geography
  • Organization type classification:
    • class: predicted organizational type (e.g., religious, political, professional)
  • Relative frequency:
    • freq: proportion of civic opportunity organizations in the geography that fall into the given class
  • Primary provider type:
    • primary_org_cat: the most common civic opportunity organization type in the geography; appears once per unit

The full datasets, along with documentation, are available via:

References ๐Ÿ“š