FAQs by Cities & Towns

Q: How do cities and towns benefit?

Participating cities and towns will enjoy the following benefits:

• Online access to citizen satisfaction ratings for your city or town, updated quarterly and benchmarked against national norms. Link to your results at eTownPanel.com/YourCity.htm

• Low-cost access to local panelists when you need to do your own custom surveys on important local issues.  Survey your local citizens for a fraction of the cost of traditional mail or telephone surveys.

• Find out what people in your community think about important local issues. Build trust and confidence among citizens by giving them the chance to make their voices heard.

Q: How can a city or town participate in eTownPanel?

Your city or town can participate by building a local panel in your area of at least 300 citizens. We can provide web and email tools that nonprofit groups or government agencies can use to build their local panel. We can also help you do a direct mail postcard campaign to your local citizens at a reasonable cost.  Just email us at [email protected] to find out more.  Upon achievement of the minimum panel size, the city or town will be added to the eTownPanel website.

Q: What does it cost a city or town to be included in eTownPanel?

Basic participation in eTownPanel is free for any city, town, or county in the United States. Basic participation includes our standard Quarterly Questionnaire and summary, online results. To do a custom survey using either national or local panelists, or to obtain more specialized data analysis, contact eTownPanel at [email protected] for a cost estimate.

Q: How would a city or town mail out postcards -- and how much do they cost?

Postcards can help your city or town build its local panel -- and they reach a more representative cross-section of the community than web-based or email methods of outreach. We have attractive and effective eTownPanel postcard designs ready to go, and we can send them to a random sample of online households in your geographic area at a reasonable cost.  Please contact us at [email protected] for more information.

Q: How can a city or town use eTownPanel to do a custom survey?

Any nonprofit group or government agency from a participating city or town can do their own, custom survey using eTownPanel. We require a brief written proposal describing the sponsor and the purpose of the research along with a draft questionnaire. Questionnaires must be composed of primarily close-ended questions and limited to no more than 30 questions or 15 minutes in length. eTownPanel will set up the web-based questionnaire, invite panelists by email, collect the data online, and provide you with a final dataset and documentation. (Because the identities of individual respondents must remain confidential, the datasets do not contain any email addresses or other personal identifiers.) Please contact us at [email protected] for a cost estimate.

Q: What topics are appropriate for a custom survey?

Custom surveys must be sponsored by a nonprofit group, academic institution, or government organization and must relate to the general topic domain of eTownPanel -- government performance and community quality of life. This topic domain is broad and includes: the environment, public safety, transportation, recreation, education, issue awareness, taxation, public works, culture and the arts, and other important community issues.  For some examples of prior studies, see our Special Reports.  However, eTownPanel cannot be used for political polls, market research, or surveys about sensitive or potentially offensive topics. eTownPanel reserves the right to judge which questionnaires or individual questions are appropriate for an eTownPanel survey.

Q: Can eTownPanel be used to do a statewide or nationwide survey?

Yes -- provided the sponsor of the survey is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization and the topic of the survey is an appropriate one for eTownPanel.

Q:  Are eTownPanel surveys "scientific"?

eTownPanel surveys are based on a sample of volunteer panelists from a localities across the US and not a random sample.  Strictly speaking, therefore, the results are not statistically projectable to the larger population.  In presenting results, we compare the characteristics of the panel to the general population.  We also weight the results so that they better reflect the general population.