What Your Score Means

After completing the scorecard, you will receive a bond issuance score weighted by the community priorities ranking, a graphic illustrating the unweighted scores by impact area, interpretation guidance, and a comprehensive list of your responses. If you provided any optional responses, these will appear in the scorecard results, but they do not count toward the project’s score.

The bond issuance score reflects potential racial equity and other social impacts a bond issuance could achieve based on your scorecard responses. Scores depend on your understanding of the community priorities and/or anticipated impacts of the bond funding, so different users may receive different scores even when evaluating the same bond issuance. When this occurs, we hope it sparks community discussion and close consideration of the issuance's impacts and opportunities for improvement. Scores may be lower than anticipated if the expected benefits are not fully aligned with the racial or social equity impact areas that are the highest priority to the community. This score may serve as just one factor when considering an issuance’s potential for racial or social equity benefits.

Based on your responses, your proposed bond issuance will receive a numerical score and a rating category for the issuance’s expected impact on racial or social equity conditions in the affected communities. Please note that any expected impacts on racial or social equity conditions are not guaranteed. Bond issuance ratings fall into one of the following four tiers:

• “Very high,” 85 points or more. If the issuance conforms to responses when executed, it is likely to provide strong racial or social equity benefits that are aligned with community priorities.
• “High,” 65 to 84 points. If the issuance conforms to responses when executed, it is likely to provide substantial racial or social equity benefits that are aligned with community priorities.
• “Moderate,” 50 to 64 points. If the issuance conforms to responses when executed, it is likely to provide moderate racial or social equity benefits or benefits that are not fully aligned with community priorities.
• “Low,” 49 or fewer points. If the issuance conforms to responses when executed, it is unlikely to provide racial or social equity benefits and may conflict with or fail to align with community priorities.

How an Issuance Is Scored

The scoring system for the scorecard has five main components:

• Individual question scoring
• Bonus questions
• Racial equity multipliers
• Impact area scoring
• Impact area weighting

Individual question scoring. Within each impact area and in the community goals and priorities section, users are asked a set of questions tailored to the project type(s) they selected. For each question, we assign a possible point total, with each possible answer assigned a number of points within that total. Certain questions have larger point totals than others based on relative importance. For instance, in the “accessible, high-quality jobs” category, the highest possible point total for the long-term jobs question is 4, compared with a possible total of 1 for the short-term jobs question. Project types do not all have the same questions or number of questions—the possible point total a user can achieve is based on the project types selected. Narrative response questions do not receive any points. 

Bonus questions. Some questions in the scorecard ask about features of the projects funded by the bond proceeds that may deliver a racial equity or social benefit, but these features are relatively uncommon or not always applicable. We treat these questions as “bonus” questions, meaning that their points are added after the individually weighted questions have been tallied. For most bonus questions, a simple affirmative response generates bonus points, but for some questions where multiple choices or ranges are provided, bonus points are generated for responses above a certain threshold of a racial equity or social benefit. In either of these cases, the bonus points from the response will increase an issuance’s score in that impact area (up to the maximum score possible without bonus questions), but an issuance that does not provide this benefit will not see its score decrease. 

Racial equity multipliers. For many features of the projects funded by the bond proceeds, we care about not only the output produced, but also how much of that output is anticipated to be available to people of color and other historically marginalized groups. To address this, we have racial-equity multiplier questions throughout the scorecard, which ask what share of a specific benefit will go to these groups. Different shares represent different multipliers, which will then be applied to answers to output questions. For example, a question about benefits will earn a full-point multiplier (1.00) when users report 51 to 100 percent of certain benefits will go to people of color, and a half-point multiplier (0.50) when they report that only 26 to 50 percent of those benefits will go to people of color.

Impact area scoring. To calculate scores for each impact area and the community goals and priorities section, we total the individual questions' scores (including bonus questions) and divide by the maximum possible score (excluding bonus questions). This process standardizes scores to ensure the total score is not influenced by the number of questions posed for a project type in an impact area. Each impact area’s score (before the weighting described in the next section) is normalized to a scale of 1 to 10, shown in the graphic on the project’s scorecard, and summed for a total unweighted score. 

We present the unweighted impact area scores on the project scorecard’s front page to show how an issuance fares across impact areas. An issuer can use the disaggregated impact area scores to prioritize areas for improvement, especially when the community has prioritized those areas.

Impact area weighting. In section 2, we ask users to rank the seven impact areas against one another (1 being of most relative importance, 7 being of least relative importance). This assigns each impact area a weight that increases the score of the most important impact areas while diminishing those of the least important. These weights are applied in descending order of relative importance: 4x, 2x, 0.5x, 0.25x, 0.25x, 0.25x, 0.25x. (The community goals and priorities section always receives a 0.5x multiplier and is not included in weighting.) The process of weighting, grounded in community priorities, allows the scorecard to adapt to different community environments. After the weights are applied, the scores across all seven impact areas and section 4 are summed.

Verifying Response and Accountability

For the scorecard to be useful, those completing the questions must provide honest answers. Users might consider asking several stakeholders with relevant project knowledge to complete the scorecard to verify that they arrive at similar scores—if they do not, the scorecard may serve as a useful tool to facilitate a conversation about an issuances’ expected impact and how assumptions may differ between parties.

By providing documentation of a user’s responses, the scorecard may improve transparency and accuracy in the bond issuance process. The scorecard may be shared with investors, community members, and other stakeholders, who can review responses and compare them against their own knowledge of an issuance’s goals or priorities. The scorecard may provide a starting point for the community engagement process around a bond issuance, or an accountability tool that can hold projects funded by the use of proceeds accountable to their racial or social equity commitments. 

Limitations of the Scorecard 

The Municipal Bond Racial Equity Scorecard can be useful in understanding the racial equity or social impact of bond issuances, but it has limitations:

• The scorecard is not comprehensive. We developed the questions based on research, insights, and feedback from leading experts in the municipal bond field, but we also acknowledge that this is a large and complex area of work. While we include questions to evaluate the impacts of many common types of projects that are funded by municipal bonds, the bond market funds a wide variety of project types, and this scorecard may not be suited to evaluate all of them. We also acknowledge that different communities have different priorities for where public funding should be channeled. We account for a variety of community priorities by allowing users to rank which categories are of greatest importance to their community, but some communities may have priorities not included in the scorecard.
• The scorecard does not assess the feasibility of projects(s) funded by a bond issuance. An issuance that receives a high score may still not have a plan for the use of proceeds that is viable in its community. The scorecard does not indicate whether anticipated projects will be successfully completed.
• The racial and social equity benefits predicted by the scorecard are not guaranteed. Even if the projects funded by the bond are executed as expected, unanticipated factors may prevent benefits from accruing as expected.
• The scorecard requires detailed knowledge of the key components of a proposed issuance. The scorecard can be used early or late in an issuance’s design. Issuers using the scorecard during the preissuance stage, when not all elements are known yet, may need to complete the scorecard using their best estimates of the expected bond details, but the scorecard may also be particularly useful at this phase because issuance stakeholders may still able to modify the issuance’s planned use of proceeds based on the scorecard’s insights. While it may be more straightforward to assess known details of a later-stage issuance, an issuer may face more difficulty using insights from the scorecard if the design and components are more locked in. Moreover, because the scorecard requires detailed knowledge of the key components of a proposed project, community-based organizations or neighborhood residents may find it difficult to use without the cooperation of the issuer.
• In section 5, the scorecard does not delve deeply into any single project impact area (i.e., housing, jobs), and is instead designed to be comprehensive and cover a wide range of impact areas. Users looking to thoroughly interrogate specific elements of a project, such as environmental impact, should consult other tools or resources.
• At this stage, this scorecard is not equipped to assess the impacts of bonds that fund projects related to public safety or judicial facilities, among others, because of their complex implications for racial equity and social impact.