Partner With Us

Interested in bringing the Civic Information Needs Census (CINC) to your community? We provide free infrastructure and support; and, for 2026, catalytic funding to help local organizations measure information needs.

Who Should Partner

Organizations invested in civic information

CINC partnerships work best for organizations that can act on data about information needs — whether by improving their own offerings, advocating for better resources, or coordinating local responses.

  • News organizations
  • Libraries and library systems
  • Foundations and funders
  • Local and state government
  • Community organizations
  • Academic institutions

How to Partner

How You Can Work With Us

What We Ask

We ask that you:

  • Use our survey instrument for a set of shared core questions
  • Make your local aggregate data for these questions publicly available so that others can similarly benefit from this growing shared resource
  • Get input from and share the data directly with other local organizations that work on serving civic information needs in your community

What We Offer: Free Benefits to Partners

In exchange for the above, we offer:

  • A standardized, regularly-updated survey instrument with validated questions designed with input from local communities, research experts, and field leaders.
  • Direct benchmarking of local survey data against other community CINCs and nationally through our growing free, publicly available dataset of CINC data.
  • Consulting to support implementation for the above, including visualization and reporting templates for common analyses of the data.

If you already have a preferred survey vendor selected, we are happy to consult with you for free on implementation of a CINC with that vendor. If you do not have a survey vendor selected, we can provide competitive pricing through our survey partner Embold Research.

Catalytic Grant Program

2026 Funding Support

In the long run, we believe that these studies should be fully funded locally. For 2026, we are able to offer catalytic funding support to some local community partners.

Up to $2,500

If you already have funding to do a local quantitative information needs survey and a survey vendor selected, we can offer a stipend if you: include our set of shared core questions; make your local aggregate data publicly available; and will have at least 700+ respondents.

Up to $15,000

If you do not have full funding to do a local quantitative information needs survey, we can offer a stipend to cover some or all of the costs of running a survey in partnership with Embold Research. Total costs of surveys vary by community, but typically range from $15,000 to $30,000.

These grants are limited to one per partner. Ideal partners are those who are committed to:

  • Impact: Using quantitative measurement of local information needs to inform action
  • Sustainability: Locally funding future CINCs in the same market to understand how conditions are changing over time

Applications will be reviewed quarterly and evaluated on total cost, impact, and sustainability. This program will only be active while funds remain available, so we encourage you to reach out today if you are interested.

Ready to Partner?

Let's talk about bringing CINC to your community.