Citizen Surveys: Getting the Information You Need

We asked Kate Blunt, one of our Senior Consultants, to share her expertise on the importance of citizen surveys - and the keys to making them successful. Kate spent more than 20 years as a Senior Executive with the federal government, most recently as the Director of Strategic Planning at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. While there she established one of the best customer feedback programs in the federal government using the results to initiate innovative customer service delivery improvements including measuring and improving internal service. Kate is credited as the architect and leader of a corporate-wide culture change at PBGC resulting in some of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the federal government.

State and local governments across the country are struggling to balance budgets in the face of an economic slowdown and maintain service levels. They are facing a number of difficult decisions about how to allocate scarce resources across an array of public programs and services: what programs to improve; what to de-emphasize; how will citizens react?

Citizens can best identify which areas of government are functioning well and which areas need improvement. They can also be instrumental in identifying how best to improve quality and efficiency. They will give you clues about where you should invest scarce resources to do the most good. In these difficult times, citizen satisfaction measurement programs can be valuable tools for government agencies to better Manage for Results.

The concept of citizen-centered performance measurement is not new to the public sector. Since 1994, federal agencies have collected and used citizen satisfaction information to improve the delivery of services including everything from the issuing of benefit checks and providing park services to collecting taxes. Last year, Cobalt Community Research in partnership with the CFI Group conducted a national citizens’ survey measuring satisfaction with state and local governments. You can review the results of the Cobalt Citizen Satisfaction Study by clicking here; scroll down to "The Cobalt Citizen Satisfaction Survey." You may be required to register with the site to download the report.

A number of state and local governments collect and publish data on resident needs and opinions about service delivery. The benefits of doing so include raising citizens’ trust and engagement, enhancing the credibility of the government entity, and having the ability to measure and track how actions taken impact citizens. Well-framed citizen surveys also provide the opportunity to determine where cost cuts, given the current economic climate, will cause the least pain.

The biggest challenges for most existing programs are expense, demand on limited staff time, measurement quality and getting actionable data.


Getting your money’s worth out of a citizen satisfaction survey

Collect actionable data. Before fielding any survey, know in advance how you will use the survey data. If you are not going to use the data, do not ask the question. What’s the goal? In these difficult times it is not enough to use survey results as public relations tools. Use the information from citizens to identify your most important services and to focus improvement efforts. Determining the most effective allocation of resources for performance improvement that delivers maximum return on investment is fundamental to any citizen satisfaction measurement program.

Focus. Go for deeper coverage of a few critical elements rather than shallow coverage of many. You will get more bang for the buck if you do.

Survey often, do it cheap, make it easy. Survey citizens at least annually. Contract with a reliable vendor with a good reputation. Study vendor methodology to know what’s best for you and understand how their approach will support budgetary decisions. Realize that prices may vary based on the scope of the study, and that you can get the most basic surveys now for $5000. Keep the survey short and sweet. You want a good response rate.

Put together an internal survey team. The team should include operations staff that have something vested in the results. Use the team to help guide development of the survey, to analyze the survey results and to recommend action based on the survey data.

Use satisfaction scores to measure the success of your entity. Focus staff on citizen expectations vs. internal policies and processes. What citizen satisfaction outcomes do you want? How well are you doing compared with similar public and private entities?

Be transparent. Publish the survey results along with the actions you plan on taking to improve citizen satisfaction.

All too often public officials are left with great one-time insights into citizens’ opinions but no clear guidance on how to translate the information into an effective action plan, and no reliable mechanism to regularly measure progress and benchmark against other similar public entities. Don’t let that happen to you.