Cohera shows you which places inside your service area your programs aren’t reaching — and which channel actually gets through. Before you spend the budget.
Every read resolves to the census tract — the same unit as a hospital service area or a CDFI Investment Area. Anywhere in the country.
You run the enrollment event and twelve people come. You mail the screening notice and nothing moves. You fund the program, staff it properly, and the turnout still reads as low need.
It usually isn’t low need. It’s a channel that doesn’t carry in that neighborhood.
Demographics tell you who lives somewhere. They don’t tell you who those people actually listen to, whether information travels neighbor-to-neighbor or institution-to-resident, or which of your programs will be invisible on a given block.
That gap is measurable. We measure it.
Every neighborhood in your service area, ranked by how far institutional trust actually reaches. Not by income. Not by need. By whether you can get through.
Some places move information through parishes, family networks and corner businesses. Others through employers, property managers and direct contact. Send the right message down the wrong channel and it disappears.
Most institutions find out whether outreach worked at the next survey, three years later. This tells you now, from data that’s already public.
sealed, pre-registered predictions held.
Most of this industry shows you a case study it wrote after the fact. We registered four predictions about how specific places would behave, sealed them ahead of the outcome, and let them land. Three held.
That test is what our core capability rests on: identifying which neighborhoods in a service area are most disconnected from institutional trust.
Field note — a New England city
A regional health system’s improvement plan named its priorities and its partner communities. We ran the city’s thirteen neighborhoods through Cohera and it confirmed the one the team already knew — the lowest institutional reach in the city, and the neighborhood their existing partnerships were built around.
Then it found another one. Third-lowest reach in the city. Strong internal networks, almost no conversion into institutional engagement — and health indicators slightly above the city average, which means it appears on no needs-based priority list anywhere.
That neighborhood doesn’t need another program. It needs a different messenger.
A needs assessment structurally cannot find a neighborhood whose numbers look fine and whose door is closed.
That’s what a first read is built to produce — and it’s why we start by showing you a neighborhood your own team already knows. Get that one right and the rest of the list is worth your time.
We name the institutions we work with only when they’ve asked us to. Until then, the finding travels and the client doesn’t.
Cohesion = Structure + Behavioral Alignment + Trust Flow
Nine civic pillars — economy, education, health, housing, environment, infrastructure, social capital, governance, safety — measured against the neighborhood’s own city, so you see what’s genuinely different rather than what’s simply urban.
Some communities keep obligation inside the group, where reciprocity can be verified without institutional help. Others extend it outward, to people they don’t know. That difference decides which channel reaches them — and an inward turn is never a temperament. It’s what a place does after institutions withdrew.
Where trust circulates, and where it converts. When a neighborhood’s own networks are strong but institutional reach is weak, that gap is the finding — and it points straight at the channel that will work.
Your needs assessment and improvement plan are already public, with priorities and partners named. We read your service area against the priorities you set and show which neighborhoods your programs aren’t reaching, and which channel carries in each one.
It isn’t a second needs assessment. It sits between the triennial cycles, where you currently have no signal at all.
Built from your published CHNA. Nothing to send us.
A certified CDFI’s Target Market is a matter of public record. We read the qualified tracts, show which are most disconnected from institutional trust, and identify the segment inside each one most likely to respond first.
It informs where relationships and outreach get built. It never touches a credit decision.
Built from your public Target Market. Nothing to send us.
Cohera runs on public data that exists for every census tract in the United States. There is no waiting list and no market we have to build toward — if you name a geography, we turn it on.
1,191 neighborhoods across 35 cities read so far. Yours is a switch, not a roadmap item.
We also hold authored reads on 5,921 cities and counties nationwide, so most conversations start with something already on the table.
Name any city, county or service area in the country. We’ll run one read at no cost and walk you through it, and you check it against what your own team already knows on the ground.
We read places, not people. No personally identifiable data is collected at any stage, and no read informs an individual credit, clinical, or eligibility decision.