Census data lags a year or more and isn't local enough to reflect what your community is facing today. Political polling is usually too small and too geographically broad to say much about any one county. What's Important exists to close that gap — direct, current input from residents, gathered continuously and shared publicly with the organizations that need it.
What's Important is a nonprofit built by people with backgrounds in federal statistical work, who saw the same gap up close: rich national and state-level data, and almost nothing built for a single community's own current concerns.
We don't run ads, and we never ask for donations. Every result is shared publicly — with residents, local officials, and local news alike.
We want to be direct about what this survey is, and what it isn't.
This is not a scientific, randomly-sampled survey like the American Community Survey. We don't stratify by age, race, or sex, and respondents find us through digital and social media, which isn't randomly distributed across the population. We don't claim these results statistically represent every resident of the communities we study.
What we do provide: direct, unfiltered input from residents who chose to share what's actually on their minds — collected continuously, in their own words, at no cost to anyone. For communities where the alternative is often outdated national statistics or no local data at all, we believe this kind of direct community voice is genuinely valuable — not as a replacement for rigorous survey research, but as something that doesn't currently exist for communities this size at all.
Many organizations already incorporate non-random input — town halls, comment periods, case-worker observations — alongside formal data in their own planning and reporting. We'd suggest treating our results the same way: as one more, genuinely direct source of community input to weigh alongside others, not as a stand-alone statistical claim.
The clearest way to judge whether this is useful to your work is to look at what respondents are actually telling us, question by question, updated as new responses come in.
See current community results →A few of the questions we ask map directly onto work many local organizations are already doing:
Grant applications, board reporting, or simply backing up what your own staff already sees anecdotally — this is meant to be genuinely useful raw material for that work, not just a survey for its own sake.
The dataset is still small — which is exactly why your help matters now. The sooner more residents take this, the sooner we can bring you something specific and genuinely useful, rather than showing up later with a finished product you had no part in building.
Organizations that help us reach more residents early are the first to hear when new, community-specific results are ready.
We're glad to answer questions, share a short video and link for your own community or newsletter, or just talk through whether this could be useful for your work.
Get in touch