Answering Respondent Questions About Postcards

When respondents get a postcard in the mail about your Polco survey, they may have questions about how they were selected. It’s important to communicate to residents that the survey has a probability-based (randomly selected) component, and to encourage them to complete the survey using the link they received on the postcard. 

We’ve created a sample email and social media post for you to address questions from residents about postcards. 

Social media template:

“If you received a postcard from @polco_us in the mail, you are part of a random selection of residents asked to provide your input to the city. Please follow the link on the postcard to complete the survey. If you did not receive a postcard, look out on our social media for a link to complete the open participation survey soon!” 

Email template: 

“Dear residents,

The city is using Polco to get valuable feedback from residents on their experience living in (insert city name here). If you received a postcard from Polco in the mail, you are part of a random selection of residents selected to provide your input to the city. We have randomly selected households within our jurisdiction to receive the survey. Please follow the link on the postcard to complete the survey. You may be asked to provide your name and zip code to verify that you are a resident of (city name), but your survey results will be completely confidential. You can read Polco’s privacy policy here. 

Your address was sampled at random from a list of all addresses from the post office. This is a standard service offered by the post office. It is not a city government file and no household member is named in the file. The resident of the property should complete the survey. 

We request that the person in the household who most recently had a birthday complete the survey. This is so that we can choose in an unbiased way a person within each household to complete the survey. While it may seem a bit strange, using the “birthday method” is a simple way to select an adult from within each household without permitting bias in our results.

If you did not receive a postcard, we still want your input! Look out on our social media for a link to complete the open participation survey soon. 

Thank you for your participation!”