How-to Post Your Community Equity and Inclusion Survey
The Community Equity and Inclusion Survey is free for a limited time. Questions have been created by National Research Center experts to help you assess community inclusivity and understand the diverse experiences of your residents. While you can tailor the questions to fit your community, we recommend keeping the wording unchanged as much as possible.
Accessing the survey
If you do not already have a Polco profile for your community, you may sign up for one here. Once signed in:
- Visit the Content section and look for the Recommended Content on the right.
- Choose the Community Equity & Inclusion Survey and click Add as Draft (you can edit drafts before you publish the survey).
- The survey is now ready to publish. Click on the survey in the list, make any additional edits you'd like, and click Publish at the bottom.
This survey does not require customizations before you publish it, but you can choose to replace the generic “your community” and “your local government” with something more specific, like your City or County’s name.
Note: Ensure your profile is active by including an image and description before publishing. At any point, if you have questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to our team using the chat form in the bottom right. We usually respond within 1-2 minutes.
Messaging for Community Surveys
The best way to promote your survey is the use of any existing social media outlets in use for your community. You want to let your community know why you are asking these questions, and what you will do with the information. Suggested messages for a website or social media:
- {Community name} is asking our residents to tell us your thoughts on equity and inclusion within the community - Please complete this quick survey {add survey URL}.
- After you complete this quick survey {add survey URL}, please share our Facebook and Twitter messages with other community members, to ensure participation by a wide variety of residents. Be sure the voice of the community is heard.
In addition to utilizing social media platforms and the community website, you may want to promote in more traditional modes, like flyers and newsletters. Suggested messaging for flyers and community newsletters include:
{Community name} is asking our residents to tell us your thoughts on equity and inclusion within our community - be heard!
Join your neighbors on polco.us/[shorturl] to provide input. More information at [short link to city blog].
Remember to engage partners in your community to help get the invitation to as diverse a group of residents as possible!
Note: Polco also has a Spanish translation of the Community Equity and Inclusion Survey available upon request. Please email success@polco.us if you are interested in using the Spanish translated Community Equity and Inclusion Survey, and we will get back to you with further information.
Walkthrough Video
(Optional) Allowing guest responses
Continued engagement is best encouraged by requiring registration as it allows you to recontact respondents. However, for surveys like this with more sensitive questions, you may not want to require registration (allowing for full anonymity instead of confidentiality).
The default on Polco is to require registration. To turn that requirement off, you need our Guest Response feature. Normally there is a nominal charge for this feature, however, for this particular survey, please contact success@polco.us and we will enable the guest response feature at no cost. (Note: After we have activated guest responses on your profile you will need to select it for your survey at the bottom of the "Create Survey" page.)
