For public institutions

The decisions cross bureau lines. The information doesn't.

The choices that matter most in public institutions — where the money goes, which projects slip, what waits on whom — span teams, systems, and bureaus. The information for those choices rarely does. Portland Civic Lab builds the connective tissue: as a service you can use next month, not a software project your staff has to feed.

Start a conversation How we stay independent

What we do

Four things we do for institutions

Flagship service

Portfolio Intelligence

We track your portfolio — initiatives, milestones, unresolved decisions, cross-team dependencies — from public and provided records, and deliver a weekly brief: the five things that need executive attention, ranked, with decisions due and dates that moved. Your monthly portfolio review runs from it. We do the data-chasing; your staff never maintains a second tracking system.

Bounded engagement

Diagnostics & decision analysis

One hard question at a time: the factual baseline, the options actually available, what each one costs, and a decision memo written to survive legal review, budget review, and a hostile hearing.

Public-facing

Civic data products

Atlas-class data products for your domain — inventories, conditions, service levels, outcomes — built the way we build our own dashboards and the Parks Atlas: source-linked, public, and honest about gaps.

Accountability

Independent evaluation

Did the program work? Mixed-method evaluation with published methodology. Where independence demands it, an outside evaluator of record signs the result — we don't grade our own homework.

Published pricing

Our prices are public, so no client wonders whether someone else got a different deal

Bands, not quotes — the final number depends on portfolio size and scope, and it lands inside the band. We price to the genuine value of the work, never to procurement thresholds.

Diagnostic

$15,000–$25,000

Four to six weeks on one question. Complete in itself — evidence, options, and a recommendation you can act on with or without us.

Portfolio Intelligence pilot

$40,000–$90,000

A bounded pilot sized to your portfolio: unified baseline, weekly briefs, facilitated portfolio reviews, and a written evaluation at the end. Every pilot closes with our honest recommendation — continue, change, or stop.

Ongoing Portfolio Intelligence

$100,000–$180,000 / year

Competitively procured, itemized so you buy only what you use. Priced by portfolio size and scope after a pilot has proven the value.

Software license & hosting

$25–50K

Portfolio data stewardship

$40–75K

Executive intelligence service

$60–120K

Custom analysis and new modules are scoped and priced separately — and appear here when they become standard offerings.

How we contract

Rules we hold ourselves to before you ask

We compete. We don't seek sole-source awards, and we don't price work to slip under procurement thresholds.
If we helped scope your solicitation, we disclose it in writing — and accept that we may be ineligible to bid on it.
During a live solicitation we might bid on, we don't contact the sponsoring office outside the process.
Any recommendation that touches something we sell carries a conflict flag in the document itself.
Everything we deliver to a public body is written as a public record — because it is one.

If your organization is subject to procurement rules, bring your procurement office in early — we prefer it. And the rest of our independence commitments, including every government contract we hold, live in public.

Read the independence page

Proof

The demo is already public

We don't ask institutions to imagine what we'd build. Our dashboards, performance cockpits, deep-dives, and the Parks Atlas are all live, free, and built entirely from public data — the same craft we bring to paid work.

See the performance cockpits Read a deep-dive