Above: Let Town officials know how you feel about services and resources, and what you would like to see prioritized. (image from survey)
The Town is requesting that residents participate in the annual survey. Topics cover quality of life, departments and resources, and priorities for what you would like to see officials focus on. The survey allows options both for a quicker overview, and for drilling down into more detail on topics you care about.
After confirming they are residents, participants will see the following survey introduction:
This survey has been put together by various town departments to collect your feedback to improve the town. Thank you for your willingness to provide honest and actionable feedback! Your answers will be shared publicly, in anonymous form, and will be provided to the Select Board and other town departments/boards to help guide improvements.
While residents interested in answering all 81 questions are encouraged to, Town officials know that not many will dedicate the 20-30 minutes required for that.
Alternatively, you can select which sections of the survey you want to skip over. But, counter-intuitively, to do that, you need to select under Question # 7 which “aspects of town that you WANT to provide feedback on today”:
- Public Works (~3 minutes)
- Recreation (~3 minutes)
- Technology & Communication (~5 minute)
- Town Process Improvement (~3 to 12 minutes)
- Local Businesses (~3 minutes)
- Youth, Family, & Social Services (~2 minutes)
- Housing, Quality of Life, & Schools (~3 minutes)
- Affordable Housing (~3 minutes)
- Library (~3 minutes)
- Transportation (~1 minute)
- Emergency Services (~2 minutes)
If you don’t check any of the boxes for the above the topics, all of them will be presented to you by default.
Once you complete the above sections, the final 10 questions of the survey seek demographic information on the respondent.
The survey is conducted each year by the Municipal Technology Committee. In September, the committee presented its findings and follow up strategy to the Select Board. You can read their presentation here.
While the survey can offer useful information to all Town Departments, one of MTC’s motivations is to get information on how the Town can improve technology to better serve the community. To that end, the committee also surveyed employees last year about the Town’s internal business processes.
I’ll post separately about the survey results and the MTC’s Action Plan. But one takeaway from the meeting was the postponed timing of last year’s survey, which ran December 15-31 (over the busy holiday season), led to fewer residents responding.
This fall, MTC opened the survey on October 1st, and residents have until November 30th to respond. Again, click here to take the survey.
