Your city or organization’s website is the home base for information, an outreach channel, and a resource for both internal staff and residents. This makes it a perfect place to announce upcoming and active surveys!
Here are some suggestions for using your website to boost subscribers and community participation:
Create a blog or landing page about your general partnership with Polco.
Explain why you chose Polco and what you want to achieve with it (e.g., increasing community engagement overall, gathering feedback on specific initiatives, incorporating resident sentiment into a strategic planning or budgeting process, etc.)
Invite residents to sign-up/subscribe to Polco in advance! You can easily email all subscribers with an invitation to participate in upcoming surveys.
Create a blog or landing page about a specific survey effort.
Answer the following questions:
Why is this survey important to the community?
How will feedback be used?
How is respondents’ data protected?
How can participants access Polco/the survey?
Create a FAQ page.
Create a home for repeated questions asked by residents, and share the link to that page in all your communications around the survey itself.
Include details about the Polco platform/partnership and respondent privacy
Share specific details about your goals, plans for using Polco, and/or actual survey efforts (ongoing and/or upcoming).
Continue adding to this page throughout the survey effort, focusing on the questions received most often from residents.
Use a website banner, modal, or sidebar to share links to a survey/poll! This can help direct visitors from your homepage and the pages of related departments to participate.
Embed an active poll on your website to make it easy for digital visitors to respond with a single click.
Example blog:
The City of Polcoville is excited to partner with Polco to provide a platform for resident engagement. We believe the Polco platform will be valuable for several reasons:
It provides a fast way for residents to learn about specific issues and give their input.
It allows the City to reach out to residents through different communication channels (social media, email, websites, etc.) while gathering resident responses in one central location.
It keeps individual opinions anonymous, while allowing City staff to see broad demographic and geographic breakdowns.
We hope that, by providing this quick and simple input process, we will hear from more people in our community and from people from varied backgrounds who have different experiences and interests.
Getting input from a wide array of residents will help us ensure that we understand the values of our community members. And it will let us be sure that we are representing our neighbors in the large and small decisions we make about programs, policies, and strategic plans.
Sign up at polco.us/[shorturl] to join the conversation.