Someone would come to a council meeting and would be the loudest person in the room. We would make a decision based on that. We wanted to make more data-driven decisions and hear more from our community.

We asked ourselves, do we have the courage to step forward and see how we’re doing? And then do we have the courage to take on this information and pique the interest of the community to do something different than we’ve done in the past?

This is very useful. I can’t tell you how many times we reflect on the community survey results to help guide our policy decisions over the next four years.

A lot of communities, especially small ones, have ever-growing demands and never-growing staff. It’s hard to prioritize. The data helps us to evaluate those things, set priorities, and make sure we use our limited resources to get to where we need to go.