Pulse is a real-time dashboard that shows city leaders — mayors, city managers, department heads — what their community is saying, across every engagement channel, without having to open each project individually. It combines participation stats, topic tracking, and a geographic view of engagement. This article covers Pulse with the "Allow agentic AI" setting turned off — no AI-generated summaries or Q&A, just the underlying data.
Before You Begin
Permissions: Pulse is only visible to users with organization- or department-level access on your PublicInput account. If your access is scoped to a specific department, you'll only see that department's data; users with full account access see everything.
Setup: None required. Pulse is available to all customers by default and works automatically over your existing projects — no configuration, data mapping, or minimum data threshold.
AI setting: This article assumes "Allow agentic AI" is off. When it's on, Pulse adds a Top Topics card and an AI Insights panel to the Dashboard — covered in a separate article — with no other change to the rest of Pulse.
How Pulse Works (AI Off)
1. Opening Pulse
Where: Left navigation → Reporting → Pulse, landing on the Dashboard. The rest of Pulse is organized into three more nav sections: Map, Teams, and Data Sources.
What Pulse pulls in automatically: survey responses and open-ended comments, public meeting comments, comment-form submissions, transcribed voicemail messages, and email submissions to your engagement addresses — scoped to your account and, if applicable, your department.
2. The Dashboard
What you see:
Five top-line stats with trend vs. the prior period: Visitors, Participants, Sign-ups, Responses, Active Projects
Engagement Timeline: daily/weekly/monthly activity by channel, toggled across 7-day, 30-day, 90-day, and 1-year views
Top Questions and Top Comments: your most popular poll questions and comments platform-wide
Not here: no Top Topics card and no AI Insights panel — nothing on this page is AI-generated; it's all direct counts and charts.
3. Map, Teams, and Data Sources
Map: geographic view of where engagement is coming from, plotted by project.
Teams: engagement broken down by department/team.
Data Sources: which channels are feeding the platform and how much volume each contributes.
These three are identical whether AI is on or off — they never involve AI.
What's Automatic vs. What's Missing
Automatic (always, AI on or off): top-line stats, engagement timeline, top questions/comments lists, map, team breakdown.
Not available with AI off: Top Topics (the AI-generated top-3–5-themes card with sentiment) and the AI Insights panel (ask-a-question, cited summaries, follow-ups). There's no reduced version of these — they simply don't appear.
Common Scenarios and Exceptions
Looking for topic/sentiment summaries or a way to ask a question: only appears once "Allow agentic AI" is turned on.
Turning AI on later: adds Top Topics and the AI Insights panel to the Dashboard; nothing else changes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Pulse replace Mayor Mode?
Yes — Pulse is the successor to Mayor Mode and is intended to fully replace it, whether or not AI is turned on.
Is my data being sent to AI in any way while this setting is off?
No — with the setting off, no AI processing of your comments occurs.
See also: