Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Rick Getschow, City Manager for Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to dive into his city's approach to community engagement, Matt Fulton and Michelle Kobayashi from Polco join us as well to talk more about their suite of survey and engagement tools. We'll learn what made Eden Prairie choose Polco and what you should know as well in your search for an appropriate vendor.
In this short series, we’re talking all about Citizen Engagement. I’ll be highlighting some of the innovators in local government leveraging available tools to better engage with the communities they serve.
Our goal is to expose more local governments to the tools available to help by efficiently providing useful information about some of the leading products out there. We’d love it if you could spend less time finding and researching products and hopefully get to launching your digital efforts to engage with your residents more quickly. Stay tuned for more episodes on innovators in local government across the globe. Read the Guide.
More info:
Featured government: Eden Prairie, Minnesota
Government Guest: Rick Getschow, City Manager
Featured Maker: Polco
Maker Guests: Matt Fulton and Michelle Kobayashi
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this short series, we're talking all about citizen engagement. I'll be highlighting some of the innovators in local government leveraging available tools to better engage with the communities they serve. Our goal is to expose more local governments to the tools available by providing useful information about some of the leading products out there. We'd love it if you could spend less time finding and researching products and hopefully get to launching your digital efforts to engage with your residents more quickly. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Rick Getschow, city manager for Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to dive into his city's approach to community engagement, Matt Fulton and Michelle Kobayashi from Polco join us as well to talk more about their suite of survey and engagement tools. We'll learn what made Eden Prairie choose Polco and what you should know as well in your search for an appropriate vendor. Thank you all for joining me today. Can you each quickly introduce yourselves and share a bit about your roles? Rick, I'll start with you.
Rick: (01:12)
Thank you, Lindsay. My name is Rick Getschow. I'm the Eden Prairie, Minnesota city manager. Um, in a nutshell city manager is the chief executive of the community. I'm hired by the mayor and city council and I'm responsible for the operations of the city on a daily basis.
Matt: (01:33)
Yeah. Hi, my name is Matt Fulton. I'm the vice president for national engagement for Polco. My primary role is really focused on business outreach for the company, trying to create new relationships and new partnerships and making connections with the communities and organizations that want to improve their engagement.
Michaelle: (01:51)
My name is Michelle Kobayashi and I'm the senior vice president for innovation for Polco. I actually develop a lot of the survey tools that are on the Polco platform and the benchmark templates that we use across the nation to measure resident opinions and also do a lot of work on the research and innovation in terms of creating national studies and writing papers and blogs about resident opinions on government.
Lindsay: (02:13)
Nice. So let's begin with a little history on Eden Prairie and what your approach, Rick has been to community engagement prior to working with Polco and really what made you seek out a tool like Polco?
Rick: (02:26)
Yeah, that's a great question. So obviously for a number of years, like most cities, community engagement was kind of the typical approach to boots on the ground and being out and about getting feedback. And obviously in the last maybe 10 or 15 years, many cities, including ours were starting to move to the internet and through electronic means to receive feedback. And we've done that through our city website, we had a few different approaches and a few different products over the years where we asked for the community's feedback on a specific issue or a specific project. And when Polco came along, they offered the ability to customize different polls and also to get engagement on specific projects. So the ability for them to create these polls and to really more systematically engage the community was something that we thought would be useful. I think it was just about two years ago, we went with Polco and we began using their tool.
Lindsay: (03:35)
Great. So you touched on this a little bit, but community engagement is a very broad term. Can you share an example of a project you're working on with them?
Rick: (03:43)
Yeah, that's a great question. So Polco does a great job of actually creating surveys on specific topics that are timely at that moment. So, you know, just in the last year we've done a survey on, COVID vaccinations. We did a survey on just COVID affecting members of the community. Those would be two of the last three, actually a third one in the last year had to do with race equity. So those three particular surveys relate to three topics that affected our community at that time, but also would work for probably many, many communities throughout the country. So we had excellent engagement and all three of those surveys. And I can, I can get into that later, but those were surveys that were customized, but yet fit a topic that we were working on at the time.
Lindsay: (04:38)
I think Michelle will hit on this a little bit later, but the power of Polco is really this research arm where you're going to have experts coming in and helping guide how you format these surveys, but first Matt, can you break down for our listeners, how Polco works and what kind of features make your product unique in this space?
Matt: (04:55)
Yeah, sure. Thanks. Um, well Polco's this technology platform it's really designed for local government and helps them connect and get input from residents, businesses, stakeholders, employees on issues that impact the quality of life in your community or in your organization. What really makes Polco a premier and unique product is its ability to provide real time insightful data that also has the ability to verify respondents. As residents come onto our site, we ask them for minimal amount of information, name, email, zip code, and we're able to then verify whether or not they're a resident, the benefit of that is that then we can append demographic data and hire them to a specific geographic location in their neighborhoods. And so you have the ability to actually separate your residents responses from overall responses, and then have data that's available describing who those respondents are by, um, income, gender age, all sorts of different demographic characteristics. What's really beneficial from a local government standpoint is the ability to actually map that sentiment out. So you can see how issues impact neighborhoods differently because of that verification process.
Matt: (06:06)
Having the ability to isolate out and understand geographically where people's sentiment are really makes it a game changer, because now all of a sudden you can really focus your efforts and your resources on addressing the areas of town and the specific sentiment that your residents are providing. Rick had mentioned that, um, we, the, the availability of relevant tools that communities can simply pull off the shelf and publish. And that's true. We actually develop with Michelle's help, monthly surveys or polls that are relevant on topics that communities are really challenged with or, or are interested in. And we make those available to communities so that as you are wanting to get information on COVID related questions or on, uh, equity and inclusion, they can just pull it off the shelf, tweak it a little bit, if they want, and then publish it out.
Matt: (06:55)
I did want to mention one additional kind of game changer, which I think is really important. And that is, we just started something called Polco live. This is a new tool that's designed to help communities that are meeting virtually. You're able to actually push out questions on topics that are on your agenda at the time. So you can get responses from your residents on that topic. What's different about this than what communities are doing right now is that information that's coming in is going to be organized and verified. So you're able to take advantage of Polco's technology during meetings so that it can inform city councils or advisory committees, or, you know, just project meetings that are going on virtually or live with an immediate impact of having that data at your fingertips.
Matt: (07:39)
It's a, it's a really unique tool that is different than a lot of the tools that people use. You're able to build a membership and a subscription so that you don't have to rebuild your panel all the time, people subscribe. And so you have that ready-made audience that's available for being connected and being engaged when you have a need for getting input from the community.
Lindsay: (08:02)
Polco and the national research center, joined forces a few years back, can you share the benefits of this acquisition and how this has helped deliver a more appealing product for those in the public sector?
Matt: (08:12)
Yeah, absolutely. Polco is really one company with two brands. The national research center has been around for over 25 years, providing representative community surveys, um, for communities across the country, literally hundreds of communities, most many times. Um, they have, uh, a suite of surveys. They're gold standard that they are mostly recognized for is called the national community survey. And this is a survey tool that communities can use for performance measurement, assessing overall quality of life. It actually takes a look at the 10 facets of community livability, and it's a wonderful tool for communities that are interested in getting an assessment of how they're doing overall. What's really neat and unique about having NRC with us is our ability to actually provide benchmarking. A lot of communities will want to know, well, we have these results, but really we'd like to know how we're doing relative to other communities.
Matt: (09:08)
And because of the 25 years of data that NRC has collected, you have the ability to benchmark your survey results in an objective way between comparable kinds of communities, so that you can assess how you are doing relative to other communities. And of course, the opportunities for doing performance measurement over time is that you can assess those trend lines going up or going down. Having the ability to have NRC with Polco and, um, take advantage of the technology allows you to take advantage of all of the features that Polco has. A lot of times communities will do an NRC survey using our help in setting up a randomized sample. So you get those representative results, but then they'll open it up to the balance of the community on their Polco profile. And we have the ability to actually keep those results separate, but take a look at them and blend them and reweight them as appropriate to tie into the community characteristics.
Matt: (09:59)
So, uh, the benefit of the merger is that we can now offer communities the ability to engage on things going on on a day-to-day basis, building, building panels of residents. So you've got a sustainable group of people in the community that you can reach out to and touch and, um, and connect with, uh, on a regular basis, as well as, uh, the suite community surveys or as Rick points out, uh, customized surveys that communities need for particular topics that are, are impacting.
Matt: (10:25)
With all of the civil unrest that's been going on in the communities around the country, one of the tools that we're getting a lot of interest in right now, uh, but really our two tools. Um, this one we call the national police services survey. It's a benchmark tool that is designed to help get an accurate picture of residents' sentiment about police services. Why that is so important is as we know through our research, that less than half of people have actually connected with police over the last 12 months. So having the ability to get that information from residents and then be able to actually isolate the experience of those people that have had experiences or some kind of interactions with the police department becomes a really helpful tool. And just understanding how your residents are relating to your police departments allows you to have a better understanding of resident priorities, their expectations, what kind of issues they feel are important in the community? It's a wonderful tool for helping police departments, realign resources based upon where residents see the need.
Matt: (11:29)
The second one is called the national employee survey with a focus on police departments. We know that a lot of police departments are seeing a lot of staff turnover. By using the national employee survey PD for police departments, you have the ability to really focus in on what are the dynamics that are impacting police departments, particularly they know when things are really tough, uh, so that you can identify organizational issues, leadership issues, those kinds of things that have an impact on a community's ability to pay attention to the needs of their law enforcement officers. Those are two just really great examples of the professional survey tools that are available for communities. And, uh, of course take advantage of the Polco technology
Lindsay: (12:12)
And Rick of these features, what would you say have been the most important or impactful features for you all in terms of selling points for Eden Prairie?
Rick: (12:22)
Yeah, I'm going to build off what Matt just said with the NRC piece. So we went with Polco, um, prior to Polco and NRC merging together. But we also previously had used NRC for our quality of life survey that we do every two years with those general questions that we ask our community. And we actually build our city budget partially off the feedback we get from that statistically significant survey. So there's this idea that you know, we were using Polco, but now we're also using the NRC survey when the two come together. And Matt mentioned that benchmarking, which is a big part of what we look at as well, comparing ourselves to cities our size in Minnesota, but throughout the nation, um, is a huge benefit because if you go back maybe even seven, eight, nine years ago, we used a local company that would call people for surveying. And while that was statistically valid, you get a good sample. You didn't have the benchmarking capabilities to other cities with similar questions across the country. So that's been a game changer.
Lindsay: (13:30)
Great. Well, there are a lot of vendors out there obviously when searching for these digital community engagement tools, how did you discover Polco and why did you decide to go with them versus a competitor?
Rick: (13:41)
Sure. Well, the honest answer to the introduction of Polco is Matt had been a fellow city manager. So, you know, we connected through being city managers in Minnesota. So I had a certain immediate trust right there with a fellow colleague. But as I said earlier, we had other more open source community engagement, uh, software or programs. And Polco offered the ability to one kind of guarantee that connection back to the resident and the community. Some of the other tools are a little bit hard to gauge are these actually your residents that are engaging. So that, that was a help. And then again, whether it's customized, um, polling or polling that they already did is something that I don't think anyone else has.
Lindsay: (14:30)
Can you give us an idea of what to expect in terms of onboarding? What was your experience in terms of timing, staff needed staff training and the like.
Rick: (14:38)
Sure. And I may not have mentioned this earlier, but our city's a suburb of Minneapolis of about 65,000 people. So we have a communication staff, a full-time communication staff of three. So we have, uh, the ability that to have some staff that are dedicated, but I do think that Polco also has the staff and support, even if you had one or very minimal city communications staff, but for us, we had some in-house expertise, but Polco had, uh, people as well that were able to help. And I think in terms of training, it's such a simple and intuitive software web based program that I think the training, you know, was rather minimal. But I do when I do get the reports from our communications staff, it's something that they've said is something they easily understand and can work with. Just the last survey that we did again, was about vaccination a COVID and I've got, you know, like a 30 page report that breaks down the answers to all the questions. Plus the open comments, we'll take the open comments. And then as Matt alluded to earlier, it's all broken down, um, in terms of demographics of residents. So we get a pretty robust report that we can look at to get an understanding of where our residents are coming from. And in this case, vaccinations. Going back to a survey prior, that was a great example of how we were able to feed that in the city policy and that was the race equity survey. We were able to give that data to our city's human rights and diversity commission, as they were kicking off our own city-wide race equity campaign.
Rick: (16:23)
And the survey predated that we were doing that anyway. And so that report was given to that commission and they went over that report and that information helped them build out the race equity plan that they want to put together in our community in terms of, um, you know, the, the residents in our community that think there, um, is a concern in terms of how our services are delivered based on race.
Lindsay: (16:53)
Michelle, I want to jump to you and in your area of expertise, do you have any advice for local governments, more generally on survey engagement that you'd want to share?
Michelle: (17:03)
Sure. Um, I actually started my career in 1989 working for the city of Boulder. And I certainly a long time ago, I soon learned that, um, and community engagement at that time was really, like Rick said, boots on the ground. It was basically a lot of community meetings. And the first meetings I went to was either there were more staff than residents at it, or there were a bunch of angry residents who were fighting with each other or yelling at staff. I, we would leave the meetings. I feel like they may have done more damage than good, honestly. But fortunately I was hired with the research and evaluation on department density. The city of Boulder kind of had a unique department at that point and it was my job to do surveys. And so I did a lot of surveys on the residents in terms of general omnibus surveys, but I also did a lot of surveys on new policies the city was considering or new things they were going to put money into. So once we started doing those surveys and then when we to the meeting and present the survey results, it was a totally different experience because now you're not fighting about anecdotal data, whether there is even a problem, but we can talk about here is the problem. And now we can move forward. It was a very efficient and usually more cordial process.
Michelle: (18:05)
And so I love that about focusing meetings around data, but what I also love about the survey in general and why I'm going to be the biggest survey evangelists you've ever probably talked to in local government is that it really brings a broader voice of the community into decision-making. Uh, very few people have the time to go to, you know, sit at their council meetings for three hours every other Tuesday night. And those of us who've been in local government now, those frequent flyers, and they often don't represent honestly, the rest of the community, even though they may argue that they do. So I always loved the fact that it's the same type of person who may not spend three hours with you. We'll spend five to 10 minutes with you. And so that, to me, it brings much more democracy into local government and also just helps governments make better decisions.
Michelle: (18:47)
So that's what I learned. And that's actually why I changed my career path and started doing survey research for the rest of my life. So I'm a big fan of it just because I think it's a really efficient way to involve residents in a way that meets them where they're at and make sure that it's fair.
Lindsay: (19:01)
Right. That's an excellent point. Matt and Rick already touched on the surveys hat have been most popular now, but I'd love to get into some of the surveys that have been created by your research team. Maybe you could confirm that the most popular ones right now are related to COVID and equity, and then talk about some of the other interesting ones that you've been working on.
Michelle: (19:20)
Yeah. If you asked me the most popular surveys that we've had downloaded and that people have been asking us to create, cause we're, we're very responsive still too. If we see hot issues, create those surveys for the Polco library, but definitely 2020 is about COVID 19. It's interesting cause you can watch the history of COVID through our surveys. So, you know, in March it was about how do you hear about COVID? How do you know if you have signs, who do you call for information? Do you know, should you trust your local government? And then it was like shortage supplies and then it moved to testing sites and then it moved to economic and emotional health. And then it moved to, you know, to community reopening and then it's back now it's vaccinations. So we've developed surveys along the way and different topics have taken, um, been more important or not, but throughout the cycle.
Michelle: (20:01)
But we see a lot of people kind of trying to measure, um, the emotional, physical and economic health of their community. We've seen a lot more interest in local government in general at their business community. One of the things, um, traditionally when I've worked with local governments sometimes they don't really feel like, um, the economy is something they have very much control over. It's kind of the economics is what it is. What we've seen with COVID that interdependence or the business community with our, the rest of our communities. So we're seeing a lot more people trying to get more tools around how to figure out economically how to build their communities, how to build their workforce, how to support their businesses during this time. Um, also found a lot of, um, interest in the surveys that had to kind of do with helping local governments make decisions because every day, because COVID hit us emotionally, physically, economically, and those are trade offs and our local government officials and staff have had to be making these tough decisions all the time where you kind of feel like you're trading off one for the other.
Michelle: (20:53)
I think by using the surveys, they've really been able to have more data driven decision making and understanding the needs of the households in their communities has helped them feel stronger in the decisions they wanted to go. So COVID definitely big. And both Rick and Matt talked about the equity inclusion. I mean the national chasm we've had affecting us at the local level as well as the social discord. I think there's been a lot of communities really interested in getting ahead, either understanding what's happening in their community or getting ahead of these relationships first and trying to figure out if their communities are welcoming on what they should be doing to kind of help heal relationships or build bridges to groups that haven't traditionally heard from. So that's been a big issue too, in terms of what we've seen most of 2020 being about.
Lindsay: (21:36)
Well, I think the equity and inclusion one is, is great. That should be a conversation we're constantly having. So if I'm a local government and thinking how is Polco gonna help me in four years from now, give me an example of a survey that would be timely for them - not so COVID related.
Michelle: (21:52)
So some of the things we were thinking about and are still thinking about we haven't, we economic development now, even more so probably with COVID has been an issue. And like I said, local governments are starting to move into that arena. They're trying to make downtowns more livable. Placemaking's a big deal, trying to figure out in these communities where the industry is changing and their workforce is changing. That was kind of a topic we were seeing a lot of before COVID even in communities that were doing well, how to make their cities more livable, more attractive, have this live work, play kind of experiences, smart growth, new urbanism. We also saw a lot of interest in older adults. Well, you know, the silver tsunami of the baby boomers, um, now getting into older adulthood, trying to design our communities in terms of places where we can successfully age in those traditional, you know, the, the older, silent generation, the way they want it to live, their retirement is very different than what the baby boomers want to do in their retirement and helping local governments, um, figure out how to make their communities better for their residents to age in place and kind of use boomers as resources.
Michelle: (22:49)
So that was an interesting topic before. And I think it's going to starting to recycle again now with COVID too, just because we know it's impacted with adults in certain ways, but also because we know we need to focus on that as our society continues to age, make our communities more livable.
Lindsay: (23:05)
Well, how great that you have all of these ready to go surveys off the shelf that makes local government's work a lot easier when trying to deploy some of these surveys. So back to the pandemic, Rick, I want to get to you, the pandemic has a huge impact on citizen engagement efforts across local governments, globally. With a tool like Polco already in place in your local government, can you point to benefits that have materialized beyond what was expected just due to circumstances?
Rick: (23:32)
Yeah. The number of people that are engaging and that are providing feedback, you know, we have never seen numbers like that before through any, any tool we've had. The amount of people that are at home or work, or just so close to technology, it's just given us so much information, um, whether it was a specific Polco survey on COVID or now the general quality of life survey that we do asking the same questions every two years, we've done that for a while and we're getting, um, just a great response. The more responses we get that, as Michelle said, that's good data for the city council to build a budget and provide services that aren't just anecdotal. So it's been interesting to watch.
Lindsay: (24:20)
That's great. And what would you say are some top takeaways you'd like another local government to keep in mind when looking for vendors in this community engagement space?
Rick: (24:29)
So what I would do, and it's very simple is, you know, you ask for a demo and you ask for that company to show you exactly what they provide, what they would provide you, how It would look how it's maintained, how it's being done for other communities. What other communities, examples from other communities of surveys. I have called other communities about products they've used, they've called me. So, um, just that communication across communities. So the ability to kind of actually in a way, um, see touch and feel their product before you would use it to know how much work it may involve and what kind of product you're getting is, is probably the most important thing you want to do before you consider going with somebody.
Lindsay: (25:22)
And on Govlaunch, we allow Polco and all of your partners to come in and share the work that you're doing together. So if you need a one-stop shop for all the ways Polco is helping local governments around you, come to Govlaunch. And for Matt and Michelle, what's some advice you'd share on behalf of Polco with local governments, looking to engage their communities, specifically a survey and polling solution, like the one you provide.
Matt: (25:44)
Well, let me respond to that in a couple of different ways. Today is always the best time to start engagement. A lot of times communities will start engaging when there's a crisis and that's not the best time to start. It's always good to be starting to build your communication strategies and using the tool like Polco um, so that you can start building that panel. Polco provides us real time solution using edge technology with all of the verifications, so that if you're interested in trying to maintain a pulse of the community on any topic that is going on, um, it's a real iterative, very easy to understand real-time tools so that you can actually engage with your community during the entire life cycle of whatever the topic is that you're exploring. It becomes a really useful tool for identifying neighborhood differences, demographic differences, getting a sense for the community if they're in favor or not in favor of a project that you've got coming up. I think one of the really interesting dynamics that's going on right now as communities are coming out of COVID is the need, and the ability to actually aggregate data on a regional basis, we've done a lot of work that goes beyond municipal boundaries, where you have a variety of communities using the tool for engaging their communities.
Matt: (26:53)
But because of our verification process, we have the ability then to aggregate that data at a level that you can look at a topic at any scale that you want from a, from a precinct level to nationally. We've done a lot of COVID stuff on a national basis and a lot of economic development stuff on a statewide basis. So we have the ability to support communities as they're trying to figure out how to collaborate with other jurisdictions as they financially figure out how to survive going forward. As Rick's pointed out and as Michelle has done such a great job of pointing out Polco and NRC, uh, and all of their suites help communities to really assess their performance and their ability for meeting strategic goals and being able to trend line it internally so you can see whether or not you're succeeding or not, as well as being able to measure yourself against other communities.
Matt: (27:43)
So it's, it's being able to have the day-to-day pulse on issues going on in the community and real time building a panel of sustainable residents, and then being able to sustain and build a performance program that allows you to explore all sorts of different aspects of your governmental operation, uh, over time to really be able to demonstrate to your taxpayers and your stakeholders, um, how you're being accountable for tax dollars and performing, uh, so that you can inform decision makers on the changes and the improvements and the issues that they need to be paying attention to.
Lindsay: (28:18)
Great. Well, Rick, we're excited that you have such a great partner in Polco and that it's working out so well for you all in Eden Prairie. Thank you all for being here and sharing your important work with the wider community of local governments looking for tools to better engage with their communities and best of luck to you, Matt and Michelle on behalf of Polco.
Rick: (28:37)
Thank you.
Matt: (28:38)
Thank you very much, Lindsay, thanks Rick.
Lindsay: (28:52)
With resource constraints and the need for better insights into your community, establishing a strong partner with experience and on-staff experts to help guide your surveys could be a smart step in the right direction. You can find more information on poco and their work with local governments like yours on Govlaunch. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.