Shawnee, Oklahoma, February 21, 2023 – Residents of Shawnee have the opportunity to provide input to the City of Shawnee’s Strategic Plan by completing a Community Survey that will be mailed to randomly selected households, starting this week. The City of Shawnee is launching this initiative to better understand local priorities and concerns on a wide range of City services and local quality of life aspects. The survey is being distributed in partnership with ETC Institute, a professional survey organization that works with municipalities across the U.S. Residents may return their completed survey via mail or submit their responses online. All responses are confidential.

The survey asks residents to rate their experience with different aspects of life in Shawnee. It is designed to gather meaningful and actionable insights from Shawnee citizens in every demographic across the community. The responses will provide Shawnee leaders with awareness and a better understanding of local neighborhood issues and community priorities, which will guide City officials as they begin developing the City’s Strategic Plan for 2023-2027. 

Below is a list of frequently asked questions. If more information is needed, contact Marcy Jarrett, Public Information Officer, City of Shawnee at (405) 273-1950 or Marcy.Jarrett@ShawneeOK.org.  

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1. What questions will be asked?
The survey will measure resident satisfaction regarding local services and quality of life in the community, while also identifying key concerns residents want the City of Shawnee leadership to address. 

2. How long will it take to complete the survey?
It generally takes about 15-20 minutes to complete the survey.

3. How will this data be used?
City of Shawnee leadership will use survey data from the community to better understand and respond to community priorities. This valuable information will be part of preparing the City’s Strategic Plan for 2023-2027, as well as other ongoing planning processes at the City.

4. Is the survey anonymous?
ETC Institute and the City of Shawnee take protecting privacy and ensuring respondent anonymity seriously. All survey responses are completely confidential. ETC Institute will be sharing aggregated numbers, summaries, and open-ended responses with the City leadership. ETC Institute removes any information that could potentially be used to de-anonymize comments provided. ETC Institute stores all survey responses in secure, encrypted databases, using industry best practices.

5. When will residents see the data and survey results?
The City will receive periodic reports. It is anticipated that the final survey report will be presented to the public in May 2023.

6. Why are only certain households receiving a survey in the mail?
The goal of the survey is to collect representative data from Shawnee residents while minimizing potential sources of statistical bias. ETC uses proprietary technology to establish the demographic representativeness of its samples. When ETC Institute develops the random sample, the address-based approach allows ETC to control the responses and to ensure that the responses are all from within the city’s boundaries. This also allows ETC to check against census data information for appropriate geographical dispersion across the community. 

7. Can one person submit several responses and skew the results? How can we be sure of the statistical validity of the survey results?
ETC Institute has quality assurance measures in place. Everything is address-based and tracked that way. Only surveys from the addresses selected for the random survey will be included, and if more than one survey is submitted for a particular address, only the first one is selected.

8. What level of accuracy will the final survey results have?
ETC Institute notes that a random sample survey of this type with at least 400 completed surveys will provide results that have a precision of no less than +/- 5% at the 95% level of confidence. 

9. If a resident would like to complete a survey, but was not among the randomly selected households to receive an invitation, can they complete the survey?
Residents not in the randomly selected group can fill out a survey on paper or online. Those responses will be collected and tabulated but kept separate from the main survey findings. To request a survey or the online survey link, contact the City of Shawnee’s Public Information Officer at (405) 273-1950 or Marcy.Jarrett@ShawneeOK.org. 

10. Who can I contact if I have additional questions about the survey?
For additional information, contact Marcy Jarrett, Public Information Officer, City of Shawnee at (405) 273-1950 or Marcy.Jarrett@ShawneeOK.org.