You can count who came. You cannot count what it did for them.

And then the plan, which is the point

That page tells you where your group stands. On its own a reading is a mirror, so it does not come alone. The plan names the Pillar that came back thin and gives you changes to the conditions, not to the people, because the conditions are the part you control.

• Regularity thin. Recurring structure. Something that happens on the same day whether or not anyone organizes it that week. Cheapest to change and fastest to move.
• Fit thin. Who gets to be recognizably themselves in the room, and whether newcomers find their footing.
• Mattering thin. People cannot see the effect of what they do, and nobody tells them.
• Mediation thin. Your digital defaults are doing the socializing instead of the room.
• Depth thin. The honest one. You can build conditions for closeness and never manufacture it, and this may not move.

What this asks of you, which is almost nothing

Your staff

One link, on a card or in an email or on a slide. Nobody has to run a session or explain anything.

Your roster

Stays yours. We never see it, never ask for it, and cannot connect any result to a person on it.

Setup

None. Nothing to install, no accounts to create, no training.

When

Whenever suits your program. People take it on their own time and finish at their own pace.

What it is good for, depending on what you run

• Public libraries. You report headcount because headcount is what you can count. This is the other number: whether the people in the room actually know anyone in it.
• Colleges and adult education. You track retention and know belonging drives it. This says which part of belonging is missing, and short of contact and short of fit need different fixes.
• Parks, recreation and municipal programs. Attendance is easy to count. Whether it worked is not.
• Employers and large teams. Your engagement survey asks how people feel about the company. It does not ask whether anyone has a single real relationship there.
• Housing and residential communities. Community is the amenity you advertise and renewal is the number you live by. Nobody checks whether the first produces the second.
• Newcomer, relocation and transition programs. Your population is defined by having been uprooted, which is the sharpest version of this problem.
• Faith communities and clubs. Belonging is the whole point and attendance is the only thing counted.
• Area Agencies on Aging and senior services. If your Area Plan asks you to describe isolation in your region, regional surveys answer that at the population level. This one is about the people actually in your programs.

What it can and cannot tell you

It can tell you how your group is doing right now, which part of friendship is thinnest across it, and where inside your group it concentrates.

It cannot tell you that your program caused anything. A single reading is a description, not a verdict, and we will not dress it up as one.

What you never see

Individual answers, ever. Names, ever. Anything anyone wrote in a free-text box. That is not a courtesy, it is the condition that makes people answer honestly in the first place.

No report under ten people, and no breakdown under ten in that group. Aggregate stops being aggregate when the group is small, and eight people split by age and Pillar can be worked backwards to somebody in the room. Under ten we say so and report nothing.

Individual answers are never sold, shared or shown to anyone. If somebody takes this through your program, your program gets group results, and they are told that in one sentence before they answer rather than in a policy they will not read.

Where this comes from

Nine of the questions come from two loneliness scales that researchers use, the UCLA 3-Item Loneliness Scale and the De Jong Gierveld 6-Item Loneliness Scale. We did not invent our own and call it science.

The 5 Pillars of Connection Health is our own synthesis of published work. It has not been through peer review or formal validation, it is a self-reflection tool rather than a clinical assessment, and it is not used to screen for or diagnose anything. We are not affiliated with any university, agency or research body named on this site, and citing a researcher is not a claim of their endorsement.

In June 2025 the World Health Organization Commission on Social Connection named measurement and data as one of five strategic areas for global action. Programs that bring people together are everywhere. Programs that can say anything about what happened to the people in them are not.

No cohort has run yet, which means the shape of the report is still something you can influence. Tell us what your funder asks you for, and there is a real chance the report is built to answer it.