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 either be directed straight to the survey, if it is only available in one language, or to the survey portal pictured below, if the survey is available in multiple languages.

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. 

The Zencity survey questionnaire as well as the survey portal are ADA accessible.

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 take the following measures to identify any duplicated responses: 

• Digital fingerprinting: 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.
  
  
• Cookies: Placed when accessing the survey website, cookies send the previous submission date, if there was one. Together with the digital fingerprint, we can use this information to understand if that previous submission fell during a previous survey cycle and is therefore eligible to be included in the new cycle. 

If a duplicate submission is identified:

• Submissions will be filtered out of score calculations.
• Users will receive the screen pictured below, blocking them from accessing the survey questionnaire. In case of an error, users will be able to submit a request to access the questionnaire and report the error via email.

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.