Has anyone ever used on-line surveys/polls to get information about planning and zoning concerns. Our planning committee would like to use this as a tool before an upcoming round table session.
If you have, can you recommend companies/programs? Also, what was your exeprience - good, bad or ugly.
Thanks
We seem to use "surveymonkey" for internal company stuff...I don't know how that well it would lend itself to a public survey. The municipalities I've worked for have all been large enough to do this sort of thing "in-house" and have the survey hosted on their webpage. There is software available which will tabulate the results automatically.
There are a lot of pitfalls to watch out for.
If you use this as an informal straw poll, you should be ok.
But watch out for things such as
>people from outside of your area voting
>underrepresented groups because of limited computer/internet access
>ballot stuffing (same person, numerous votes)
>"mobbing the site" - where someone with a certain opinion calls on others to vote one way, campaigning for their option.
>not providing "the choice I wanted" as an option
Some of these problems can be circumvented. Some are harder to deal with. Be prepared to answer these type of questions!
There are several survey tools out there now you can use if your municipality's tech department can't set this up for you. Surveymonkey or surveygizmo are good and simple to set up.
It becomes a whole lot easier if you know who will be taking the survey (you send them e-mails with a passcode, and viola... most of the issues above are gone). You are just left with the issues of the tool itself (eg. leading questions, response order bias, etc). Have fun!
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