Agenda - Council Work Session - 11/12/2014

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User Guide to The National Citizen SurveyT" this hypothetical community may want to focus its resources on sustaining or strengthening its image as a safe place with many recreation opportunities and ease of travel by car and light rail. How to Use Benchmarks Many of the charts and tables in The NCS reports have been color -coded to indicate how your results compare to national benchmarks. Benchmark comparisons often are used for performance measurement. Communities use the comparative information to help interpret their own citizen survey results, to create or revise community plans, to evaluate the success of policy or budget decisions and to measure local government performance. Taking the pulse of the community has little meaning without knowing what pulse rate is too high and what is too low. When surveys of service satisfaction turn up "good" citizen evaluations, jurisdictions need to know how others rate their services to understand if "good" is good enough. Furthermore, in the absence of national or peer community comparisons, a jurisdiction is left with comparing its fire protection rating to its street maintenance rating. That comparison is unfair. Streets always lose to fire. More important and harder questions need to be asked; for example, how do residents' ratings of fire service compare to opinions about fire service in other communities? A police department that provides the fastest and most efficient service — one that closes most of its cases, solves most of its crimes and keeps the crime rate low — still has a problem to fix if the perception of residents in the community it intends to protect is not so strong. The benchmark data can help that police department — or any department — to understand how well citizens think it is doing. Without the comparative data, it would be like bowling in a tournament without knowing what the other teams are scoring. NRC recommends that citizen opinion be used in conjunction with other sources of data about budget, personnel and politics to help managers know how to respond to comparative results. NRC's database of comparative resident opinion is comprised of resident perspectives gathered in surveys from over 500 communities whose residents evaluated the same kinds of topics on The NCS. The comparison evaluations are from the most recent survey completed in each community; most communities conduct surveys every year or in alternating years. NRC adds the latest results quickly upon survey completion, keeping the benchmark data fresh and relevant. The Basic Service includes national benchmark comparisons. If you chose a custom benchmarks comparison as an additional service to the basic NCS, these comparison will appear in this appendix, as well. Jurisdictions in the benchmark database are distributed geographically across the country and range from small to large in population size. Data come from tens of thousands of individual evaluations of community quality, service delivery and engagement. Despite the differences in jurisdiction characteristics, all are in the business of facilitating a high quality of life for residents, typically by providing local government services to residents. Though individual jurisdiction circumstances, resources and practices vary, the objective virtually everywhere is to help create and sustain highly livable communities. Where Benchmarks Come From NRC has been leading the strategic use of surveys for local governments since 1991, when the principals of the company wrote the first edition of what became the classic text on citizen surveying. In Citizen Surveys: how to do them, how to use them, what they mean, published by ICMA, not only were the principles for quality survey methods articulated, but both the idea of benchmark data for citizen opinion and the method for gathering benchmark data were pioneered. The argument for benchmarks was called "In Search of Standards." "What has been missing from a local government's analysis of its survey results is the context that school administrators can supply when they tell parents how an 8o percent score on the social studies test compares to test results from other school systems..." 12