Where to Start
New to MapAgora? This page offers prompts and reflections to help you begin exploring the dashboard and datasets—whether you’re curious about your own county or conducting place-based research.
Use the following prompts to guide your exploration:
- What kinds of civic opportunity organizations are more common in rural vs. urban counties in your state?
- Which counties have especially high or low civic opportunity scores? What might explain those patterns?
- How does your county compare to others nearby—or to the national average?
- What does this data confirm or challenge about your understanding of civic life in your community or region?
MapAgora offers a scalable and comprehensive map of America’s civic infrastructure—but no dataset is perfect. This dashboard is an invitation to explore, question, and extend what you see.
If you’re working in a specific place, you might: - Click into a few counties directly on the map, - Download the ZIP code–level dataset for more granular views, or - Use the organization-level dataset to reconstruct civic opportunity scores at the city level.
We encourage users to compare what they find here with external sources like Google Maps, Yelp, or local directories. This can help surface civic organizations that may not be captured in the dataset—such as informal neighborhood groups, mutual aid networks, or online communities.
These comparisons not only highlight what might be missing, but also why—whether due to registration status, online visibility, or organizational disclosure norms.
Engaging with the data in this way helps refine place-based research, enrich local knowledge, and spark new questions about what counts—and what is counted—in civic life.