SATISFYING SURVEYS
How much will a community survey really help?

The article was originally published in the March 2019 Issue, Public Management magazine of International City/County Management association. It has been revised for general audiences.

Does your organization conduct community surveys? Have you ever used surveys for evidence in decision making? If you answered “no” to these questions, keep reading to find out how a survey can improve your community and the services your organization provides. 

A survey is a type of opinion poll that asks the community of their perspectives on issues, and it can be an important tool for informing decisions.

Satisfaction versus Perception

Individual opinions can be categorized into two types: satisfaction and perception. Satisfaction surveys are based on usage and experience, while perception surveys are based on observation and feeling. 

Before getting into these two types in detail, it is important to understand the variety of organizational activities. Let’s use a local government as an example: it conducts two sets of activities: operational activities, which are routine services like garbage collection, road maintenance, or bus services, and transformation projects used to achieve long-term prosperity. Examples of transformation might include revitalizing downtown or building a light-rail or subway system.

With these activities in mind, here are definitions of the two types: Satisfaction surveys provide a measurement of usage and experience held by the community regarding the services provided. Perception surveys provide an indicator or observation regarding the progress towards achieving long-term strategy or a strategic plan. Both of these types of surveys present different sets of information and should be treated differently.

Connecting Surveys to Decision Making

The results from satisfaction surveys highlight people’s experience in accessing your organization’s services and uncover opportunities for service improvement. Knowing the satisfaction rating of the public transit service, for example, and the factors driving the rating— on time, frequency, hours of operation, service coverage, safety, or cost—can help the service area to better prioritize and deliver cost-effective services.

Perception surveys, on the other hand, inform different decisions related to opinions.

One of the corporate outcomes under the strategic plan of the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, for example, is community connectedness. Connectedness is about residents’ personal well-being and feeling part of the community.

In order to collect opinion-based feedback, using a perception survey is instrumental for this purpose. For the connectedness example, residents were asked: “Considering all aspects of your community life, please indicate the degree to which you agree or disagree with the following statement – I feel connected to my community?”

This question was designed to be broad in nature and to help surface the issues relevant to the community overall. The question is subjective—it is about the feeling of respondents. The results of using perception surveys in this way have helped the council identify opportunities and take corresponding actions. 

Four Steps to Improving a Survey

Satisfaction and perception surveys ask different questions to collect diverse opinions. Both are essential for understanding feedback from the community’s point of view and for making good decisions.

Here are steps to help you manage both survey types:

These factors are by no means the only approach or steps to collecting data and to enabling decision making. As public organizations move forward with evidence or data-driven decision making, upgrading your current survey approach might be a convenient and quick way to achieve this goal.

1. Define your survey objective. Be clear about your objectives. Are they service improvements or transformational changes? Choose one objective per survey and stick to it. Combining two objectives into one survey may result in a lengthy survey, as well as reduce respondents’ patience, both of which will affect the quality of responses.

2. Draft a questionnaire that is conducive for decision making. Properly design the questionnaire to create an effective path for decision making. For the satisfaction survey, it is important to ensure the respondents have accessed the service before they answer the satisfaction question. Second, carefully draft the follow-up questions to capture satisfaction drivers. For the perception survey, create a context for the question by sharing the definitions. Share the definition of connectedness, for example, before asking the perception question.

3. Decide on the appropriate data-collection method (telephone versus online). The data-collection method impacts survey cost and data quality; therefore, it is one of the critical decisions in the survey process. 

Online and telephone-based surveys are the two most common methods. Online surveys have a cost advantage; however, the sample is not representative to the local population that impacts the quality of data and analysis. Telephone-based surveys have lower response rate, which could lead to costly data collection.

4. Conduct a demographic analysis. Last, but not least, demographic analysis is important to a community-centric approach. Demographic analysis refers to analyzing survey responses by demographic categories, including age, gender, education, income, duration of residence, and other factors. Knowing the persona of high- and low-rating respondents will help develop more targeted actions and address their needs at a granular level—initiatives to boost ratings for low-income or senior-service users or collaboration with settlement services for new immigrants.