The Zencity survey experience for residents

What is the experience like for one of your residents who takes a Community Survey that you’re running with Zencity? Below, we’ll cover what that process looks like.

Step 1: Discovering the survey

Residents can discover the survey through your outreach initiatives, such as a post from your official Facebook page or a link in an online utility bill, as well as through Zencity’s digital distribution methodology, which displays the survey on the platforms and apps residents are already browsing. 

Step 2: Starting the survey

When a resident clicks on a link or ad for the survey, they will be directed straight to the survey. If the survey is programmed in multiple languages and the resident has their device in one of those languages, they will see the survey in the language of their device. Residents can also switch the language as shown below. 

With all available survey languages offered on the same page, it creates a more accessible experience for respondents. 

In addition, the Zencity support email address is also displayed throughout the survey, so residents can be in touch if they encounter any problem along the way. 

Step 3: Taking the survey

From the start page, residents will then be guided through the questions, which have been crafted to be clear, engaging, and short. 

Step 4: Submitting the survey

When a resident submits the survey, we ensure that the response they’re submitting is not a duplicate and therefore liable to skew the results. Therefore, we use digital fingerprinting to preemptively disallow multiple responses within a cycle. A digital fingerprint is a mechanism used to create an anonymous ID to represent a particular computer without storing any actual individual pieces of information about that computer. It’s created by mashing together a collection of technical pieces of information about the participant's computer and browser into a string of numbers and letters, such as: 07e101b3478e64ae547d82ff03e4ebf2. That fingerprint then allows us to spot any duplicate submissions. If someone tries to take the survey multiple times, we will detect the duplicate fingerprint and show a message thanking them for already taking the survey, disallowing any response within that cycle.

A note on data privacy: As one of Zencity's core tenets, we take every measure we can to ensure the anonymity of survey respondents. We only collect the survey question responses that are provided, along with anonymous metadata that cannot be decrypted. There is no way that Zencity can identify an individual from the survey responses provided.