The role of the public in municipal strategic planning has evolved from old-school, top-down processes to today’s highly collaborative approach.
Community input is critical to municipal planning, and while public meetings and focus groups provide great venues for in-person comment, they can fall short. In-person collaboration often omits swaths of residents who can add value—caretakers, single and working parents, night-shift workers (nurses and hospital staff, for example), gig workers, underserved communities, people without reliable transportation, and more.
Public leaders must extend every opportunity for their residents to be heard. Surveys can help close the participation gap and provide an effective first step in soliciting community input. But, the right structure must be built into the process.
Here are five ways to use a community survey to get constructive input for your next strategic plan.
- Encourage realistic expectations. Resident input is extremely valuable, but it can also lead to unrealistic expectations if left unchecked. If you know you’re not able to build a splash pad, new recreation center, or other pricey public amenities, don’t ask your community if they want it. Alternatively, if your community has already decided to build a new Village Hall, water treatment plant, or to change village branding, avoid backtracking or ask for input on those agreed-upon projects. If you misjudge community sentiment, you can find yourself in zugzwang—stuck in a lose-lose decision to move forward with a plan that survey data does not support or scrap a project that has already started.
- Make your survey easy to access. Most people are familiar with QR codes, and according to Pew Research, 85% of Americans own a smartphone. QR codes can be printed and shared in newsletters, postcards, utility bills, flyers, billboards and more. Publish the survey link on your website, in social media posts, and in any regular email from city offices to residents. Printed surveys can be distributed through libraries, senior centers, the municipality front desk, and other places where people without smartphones are likely to visit. Hard-copy survey responses will be manually entered by staff later.
- Make your survey easy to answer. Avoid forced rankings (where respondents put answers in order of preference) as these can be difficult to answer. Instead, opt for multiple choice grids with a consistent answer scale, such as high priority, medium priority, low priority, or not a priority. This will help you gather more accurate input on important issues to your community.
- Ask few, and ideally only one, open-ended question. Answering open-ended questions is time-consuming, and categorizing responses to pull out insights is difficult. In fact, studies show respondents are more likely to skip open-ended questions or provide low-quality or even irrelevant answers. Instead, consider closing your survey with a question such as “Do you have any other information to share?” or other general questions. This approach creates an opportunity for residents to easily add relevant information without complicating the survey process.
- The shorter, the better. Many survey platforms will let you know how long a survey should take to answer. Overcome survey fatigue by keeping your completion window close to 6 to 8 minutes and tell respondents upfront how long it should take to complete. One of the biggest survey platforms, SurveyMonkey, shows that participants spend five minutes on average to complete a 10-question survey, but 10 minutes to complete a 30-question survey—a sure sign of survey-taking fatigue.
Residents and community leaders have much to offer for priority setting during the strategic planning process. Municipal leaders who forgo asking for their input early on tend to get a whole lot of it at the end—often in the form of frustration.
Community strategic planning surveys can be an excellent opportunity to build connections and identify priorities. If you’d like to learn more about effectively incorporating surveys into your strategic planning process, reach out to [email protected] to learn more.
