Community Survey Onboarding EE + AM
Why do we run community surveys?
Description
Zencity's community survey is an ongoing survey that helps local governments measure resident satisfaction — with their community and with local government-provided services — over time and against a cohort of similar communities. It's built around three core principles:
Timely
Zencity's digital distribution reaches residents where they already are — on their phones, tablets, and other devices — instead of relying on slower traditional methods like phone or mail surveys. That speed matters: it means clients get current, in-hand data quickly and can act on issues while they're still relevant, rather than making decisions based on sentiment that's already months old by the time it's collected and processed.
Recurring
Rather than a one-off snapshot, the community survey is fielded on an ongoing cadence tailored to each client. This means clients aren't just capturing a single moment in time — they're building a trend line they can track over multiple cycles, seeing whether satisfaction is improving, declining, or holding steady, and adjusting their focus (e.g., swapping in a new add-on topic) as new issues surface in the community.
Benchmarked
Results aren't just informative in isolation — they're contextualized. Zencity Benchmarking compares a client's scores to peer communities with similar demographics, population size, and characteristics (currently U.S. clients only), so clients can tell whether a given score is genuinely strong or weak relative to comparable places, not just relative to their own history.
Community Survey Questionnaire Structure
Important Links
Community Survey Workflow Overview
Workflow
New client closed!
Survey Ops Shares CS Template
Send the Client the Survey for Review
Confirm Timeline with Client + Survey Ops
Survey Approved — Move to Setup
Survey Operations Sets Up Survey + Distribution Begins Distributing Survey
CS reports creation
Monday board explanation - https://zencity-hq.monday.com/docs/18403861074
Community Survey Reports: Workflows + Values
Example Reports
Here we have attached a few example of different community survey reports and the differerent ways we can use the report to add value. For any more details please reach out to an EE!
Performance Management - Pasco County Community Survey Report - Strategic Plan (ENT, within platform)
This is an example of a community survey and questionnaire aligned to Pasco County's Strategic Plan — showing how survey data can map directly onto the goals and metrics a county is already tracking. Rather than sitting apart as a one-off report, it becomes part of the county's existing performance management process, giving leaders defensible, resident-informed evidence to bring into planning and reporting cycles.
Strategic Initiatives - City of Boston Community Survey Report (ENT, out of platform, still relevant)
This is an example of a community survey report created for the City of Boston. While some elements of this report were created outside the platform, it highlights a potential way to utilize CS work to support a strategic initiative. On slide 24, the report shows that satisfaction with affordable housing increased. That finding becomes much more valuable when it's read alongside what's actually happening in local government — in this case, Boston had been running a series of affordable housing initiatives around the same period (slide 25). We can't say one caused the other, but we can provide context for the findings we're seeing based on what's going on in the city.
Budget Planning - Ventura, CA (MM, within platform)
During budget planning, city leaders can start with the Community Characteristics section to see where residents are least satisfied — in Ventura's case, affordable housing, jobs that pay a living wage, and overall cleanliness and maintenance. The Priority Matrix then shows which of these actually drives quality of life: jobs that pay a living wage lands in "High Impact Challenges," low satisfaction and high impact, making it a strong candidate for budget attention. The Change Matrix shows this isn't stable — satisfaction dropped 5 points citywide, concentrated among Hispanic/Latino residents (-16%), residents aged 18-34 (-27%), and District 7 (-19%) — giving leaders a clear place to focus, down to the district level, before finalizing allocation decisions.
Budget Planning + Strategic Planning - Houston, TX ( ENT, within platform)
Like Ventura, Houston used its Community Survey for budget planning, adding a follow-up question that asked residents directly: if the city had to stop funding something, what should it be? This gives leaders representative data on residents' actual priorities — something standard survey ratings alone can't surface. Houston also used follow-up questions during a crisis response: after public pushback over closed bike lanes, the city needed to know whether the reaction reflected a vocal minority or broader resident sentiment, and how people were actually getting around. The Community Survey gave an initial read, and a follow-up Pulse survey went deeper on the topic — giving leaders defensible evidence to act on.