By Madeline Baker, Times Chronicle
The Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen (RDOS) Citizen Survey that was introduced in 2020 will return in April 2023, giving residents a chance to express how their levels of satisfaction with various aspects of life within the regional district may have changed over time.
CAO Bill Newell explained that the surveys are part of a plan to improve the regional district’s communication with citizens by adopting the practice of “environmental scanning” to “find out what the issues are before they become problems so that you can be proactive, get out, and get after them.”
The goal is to bring staff perception of the district’s services closer in line with citizen perception as reflected in the surveys – in short, if RDOS staff by and large believe that a situation has improved, this improvement should also be reflected in the opinions of citizens. According to Newell, that link reflects the quality of communication between a government and its people.
This year the RDOS hopes to “reach out with particular attention to people outside the online world,” according to communications supervisor Erick Thompson, as they want to reach the widest possible cross-section of the population and they know not everyone in the regional district is active on the Internet.
To achieve this aim, they plan to launch a marketing blitz that will involve posters, physical informational material, local Community Champions tasked with promoting the survey to residents at street level, and an alert on the Voyent! Smartphone app along with promotional material on all RDOS-hosted websites and social media platforms.
Promotion is an important aspect of the survey because participation is self-selected, meaning that people choose to offer their feedback instead of being contacted by phone. Physical copies of the survey itself will also be made available at several locations to be announced later, as well as online at the RDOS Regional Connections interactive website.
The survey itself will contain the same questions that were used in 2020’s Citizen Survey and follow up survey, which focus largely on services provided by the RDOS – everything from park maintenance and recreation facilities and programs to emergency and protective services – but also touch on some issues outside of their purview like health care and road maintenance.
Once the survey results have been gathered, two focus groups of specially selected community leaders will hold facilitated discussions in order to pinpoint any key themes and determine which areas require additional community feedback.
Those meetings will be recorded and, along with interviews and visual aids that illustrate survey results for the viewer, worked into a brief video report that Thompson hopes will “bring the results and stats and graphs to life” and deepen the context behind broader statistical answers for board members and the public alike.
“If we hear, for example, “I like my quality of life in the regional district,” that’s one thing, but then if we hear a person say why, that can really explain it and provide more context to what they’re saying,” said Thompson.
RDOS directors raised some concerns about the survey when it was presented at their March 16 meeting. Directors Helena Konanz and Subrina Monteith both questioned the inclusion of services that are outside of their purview in the survey questions and whether that will cause confusion among respondents.
Monteith brought particular attention to the fact that water quality, which is a major issue in some areas like Osoyoos, would be irrelevant in other electoral areas where the RDOS is not involved in water maintenance systems.
Thompson said that respondents need to have the option to rank major province-wide issues as “most important” regardless of where the responsibility lies, both for the sake of their analysis and as valuable information for the BC government, but added that he would see if a note of clarification could be added to those questions.
Another worry of Monteith’s was that people with multiple homes across various Electoral Areas in the district would be unable to answer the survey for more than one of those areas, which Thompson confirmed and said he would consider for future surveys.
Going forward, the RDOS plans to repeat this survey every second year in order to maintain an up-to-date comparison of staff and citizen perceptions. Residents of the regional district can expect to hear more about the 2023 Citizen Survey in the upcoming month.
