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LISTEN AND LEARN FROM THE BEST IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT

At LeaderGov we want to equip you to lead well.   These enlightening podcasts,
from top local government and industry leaders, will help you gain valuable
insights into a variety of leadership, management and teamwork topics, so you
can lead better. 

You can also listen to LeaderGov Podcasts via Apple, Google Podcast or Spotify. 


Growth and Development Graphic

TRANSCRIPT 

0:05
Good day everybody in local government land out there cities and counties all
across the country. My name is Bill Stark, and I'm one of the co founders here
at LeaderGov. Along with my business partner, Tim Fenbert. We really do truly
love serving local government leaders, whether you're in public works in public
safety, community development, city, county managers, everything in between,
we've got taxing Commission's and all sorts of different agencies that tune in
to our podcast. And we really love equipping you to be great leaders. So you can
lead teams successfully, and ultimately impact the community. And a lot of our
work in local governments starts with the question of where are we going, what,
what's on the horizon? Where's our what's our vision? What's our strategic plan?
And so today, we're going to talk about a very important element, one of the
early elements of strategic planning, which has to do with gathering stakeholder
input. And so we're going to kind of talk about this idea of surveying citizens
and stakeholders within the community. So community voices in strategic
planning, harnessing stakeholder insights, that's kind of where we're going
today. And we have a wonderful guest. He and I met at a recent conference. Ron
Gailey. Ron, how are you doing today, sir?

1:29
Very good. Bill. It's good to be here. Thank you.

1:32
Yeah, so nice to have you. I was so impressed by what we talked about. At the
conference, the city city county manager conference the other day, I thought,
we've got to do a podcast on this because you know, whether you're even whether
you're a department leader, or a city or county leader, getting feedback and
input from your stakeholders is just critical to, you know, being pointed in the
right direction, and really responding to what the market needs. So super topic
and looking forward to it, Ron, so I want to just share a little bit with the
audience about who you are. I know you found it on point, insights, you've
directed market research at two large Fortune companies, banks, and also
director of insights at Coca Cola in Asia. And I know your task day was to
create insights that senior leaders needed for strategic direction, which is
what we're talking about today. And I know you wanted to start your own research
company, which you did call mobile digital insights back in 2017. MD, quickly
grew as you and your team devoted to help leaders at Coca Cola T Mobile KFC,
that's a good client, chicken client. I like that 1800 contacts and several
international clients make the right decisions with smartly designed research
input. I like that I like that phrase smartly designed research. Along the way,
Ron started onpoint insights, a research company devoted to helping civic
leaders with their challenges, particularly mayors, city manager, City Council's
and others. It's Ron's way of using his skills and experience to give back and
support the local community. That's awesome. I'll let you know you so so many
years out doing research in the corporate world. And now you're bringing a lot
of that expertise to cities and counties. That's wonderful. Ron, great, great to
have you again, on our podcast.

3:28
Thank you.

3:30
Yeah, as I said, we met at a conference several weeks ago. And the more I saw
what you all were doing, particularly on the output side of presenting data, I
thought, oh, my gosh, this is kind of interesting. I just want to jump right in
Ron. So again, we've got mayor, city council, city managers, county managers and
large departments listening to this. What would you say generally about
stakeholder input, again, whether it's a small department needing to get input
from stakeholders, or more what you do today, which is preparation for a
strategic plan can speak sort of broadly, to the idea and the need to get good
quality stakeholder feedback, just in general. No,

4:15
just in general. Look, in my experience working at the banks, you mentioned a
couple of banks and at Coca Cola, we would help the executives of the company
with their decisions, and oftentimes they would be literally paralyzed, not
because they couldn't make decisions. These are some of the smartest people on
Earth, and I loved them, you know, like they were really smart people. But when
you have differences of opinions, and you cannot get clarity on a group on the
right focus or the right way to go, you often spin your wheels over and again,
right and you just you reset it for the next meeting. Hopefully you can come up
with something better, but between now and then, and it just kind of leads to
inaction or slow, slow action. And, and so I that's why I think it's so
important. And it's been helpful for my entire career to kind of break the ice,
you know, or break the barrier that was in the way and to give sufficient
clarity that they could they could move forward with confidence. Really? Yeah,
give confidence, rather than the gift of even the data itself, like it is the
gift of okay, we're going in the right direction. Yeah, yeah, I

5:26
liked that. I liked that. Because, again, listening to the podcast today, we've
got like, public works managers, right, guys running road crews. And it's a huge
range of people listening to this podcast. And we all need to be open to and
intentional about engaging our stakeholders, our customers, if you will, even if
you're if you're the finance director, at a city, I mean, your stakeholders or
the department heads, right, the people you serve.

5:52
totally right. You know, that brings to mind an interesting experience. We were
helping a town in Idaho. And we were designing a questionnaire about a variety
of things. And the city manager said, can we figure out the priority in which we
should fix roads? You know, I said, Yeah, well, we've not done that kind of a
study before. But let's brainstorm on this. And we came up with a way we showed
a map. And on the map, we said, Here are 10 areas that the city is thinking
about improving the interchanges the lights, you know, the things that are
happening here, which two would you recommend, so everybody picked their top
two. And out of that 10, they got total clear, like the top three just popped up
to the top, you know, and and then the city manager said, those were the three,
we were hoping, you know, like they were hoping well, how it would come out. But
it did come out that way. And then a way they went, you know, and again, allowed
them just to move? Well, yeah, we

6:51
talk a lot about buy in, in our work, getting engagement and buy in from the
people you serve from your team and serving stakeholders, again, whether it's a
very small little handful of folks that you go sit down with and do a focus
group or a little informal survey via email. But today, we're talking about
specifically more around strategic planning. And I would just love to start with
this this question of what is a strategic plan? Even Why do you think it's the
community data is needed? Because we have a lot of not with some local
governments who say, Well, I'm the city council, I represent the citizens. I
know what they want, here's what we need to do. And there's probably nothing
wrong with that. But but at the same time, we we want to connect to citizens at
some point at stake. So how do we what What's your perspective on that in terms
of the need, or the bid and the benefit, obviously, of getting input directly
from stakeholders?

7:50
Yeah, you know, I, the elected officials do represent the citizens and their
assumptions, or hunches, their beliefs, or experiences, all of those things are
very important. Still, you know, a sample of one person, even if it is the
elected official, might be lacking, there might be some things that are there.
And so I think it's really important for people to have a well rounded picture,
even if you're ultimately needed, the one who needs to make the decisions and
decide where you go, that picture ought to be pretty well rounded. And so in our
research, what we try to bring our errors, the right kind of design survey can
bring you the needs of the many. And sometimes that's vital, because oftentimes,
elected officials, they definitely hear the needs of the few, you know, and they
they get that feedback and the needs of the few are, like important to know, but
they are important to know in the context of the needs of the many. And so I
think that's where it's so helpful, right? Just to stay grounded on generally,
what are the needs of the many so that you don't get totally distracted by the
needs of the few and therefore neglect the needs. And that can

9:00
happen. Well, yeah, yeah. And I would, I would also add to that, you know, this
whole idea of if we do a survey every year or two, we're now going to start to
see some curves. Hey, last year, we were 3.9 this year were 4.9. And that now
becomes sort of scientific data as opposed to my hunch that Yeah, I think we're
getting better. I feel like we're getting better. But this data can really
substantiate Wow, we're, oh, we're falling behind in this area. Oh, no, we're
doing great in this area. And it really takes away that subjectiveness of I
think we're doing okay. Do

9:31
you know, it's really interesting, because I visited with a city in Texas, I was
just in Texas, and we were reviewing their trend data, they, you know, this was
the third year of their trend, and we were looking at the trend data, and some
things had gone down, you know, and we were looking at the things that have gone
down. And then interestingly enough, we looked at where the survey responses
came from. And we saw that in the past social media responses were in general
quite positive, but that this last couple of years, they've been steadily
declining social media, the Facebook and we you know, though responses were
people came in from social media because we'd love to get a well rounded group,
you don't want to just have only one source, we'd love to have several. But we
looked and saw that social media had been declining. And we were talking about
that with the mayor and the council and the mayor just goes, you know, we have
been neglecting our time on social media to communicate, and to speak with
people and to let them know what's going on. Because if they came in from email
or other sources, they were high, they're positive, and that they came in from
social media, they were far more negative. And that was like that was well a
wealth of information that helped them in their communications department, their
planning and so forth.

10:48
Yeah, yeah, that's good. I want to ask you, so we're getting kind of nerdy here,
research type nerdy, but tell us your perspective on stakeholder input through
online means, like the survey, whatever. versus in person me standing at the
county fair, you know, handing out iPads for surveys. Do you have a perspective
on that? Is is is the old male out 5000? paper ballots? Is that Is that still
part of the mix? Or does it really matter in the end, kind of how you get the
data?

11:21
I think it matters. First of all, um, you talked about face to face, I love face
to face, and I think it has a place I think it is has a lot of merit. On the
other hand, just a handful of people. And so you can get mired in the needs of
the few, rather than understanding the perspective of the needs of the many. So
their, their their potential issues. And so we love online surveys, and the way
we love to gather them is from, from as many logical sources as people have
contact with a city or town. Right? So we love to use email, we love to use
Facebook, we love to use posters, we love to use postcards, a mailing, you know,
we'll use whichever one seemed to make sense for that particular city. And then
we get a well rounded group, and we make sure they're thoughtfully balanced. And
then we're able to compare how people who interact with the city in different
ways feel. So verse answer is, is we try not to use just a single channel to
invite people. If we do we default to email and text. Those are two really good
ways. Post. Very few people respond from the mail. Like it works, but very few
people respond in much lower numbers. And so we use it to kind of augment and
bring in the apartments or other things. All right, so that's one thing. And
then did you did you ask me like, What are the risks of online? Did you say
that?

12:56
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could you get skewed? Like, I mean, people you kind of want to
know, older versus younger, you want to know ethnicities as well, I guess,
right.

13:06
So there are risks, you want to make sure you have a very balanced population,
but there are bigger risks online, like a poorly designed survey, will do you
less of a service than you know that then a well designed survey to a mixed
group of people to not the ideal group of people almost right. garbage in
garbage out, you know, is really something to pay attention to you, like an a
long survey, sometimes people will do a 20 minute long survey, I cannot believe
that are 25 minutes long. And they have the surveys that are so long, and people
I know they've zoned out after eight or nine or 10 minutes, you know, they kind
of like, you know, like, I would not do one. And I presume you wouldn't either
that is like super long. And so anybody like you or me, we're out. And then the
only ones who are in or those who are like, they'd stick it out for whatever
their reason was, you know, so you need to make sure that it's short. I like him
10 minutes or less, you need to make sure that it's it's well designed, you
know, and we can get into that later, like what well designed is you also need
to prevent ballot stuffing, which we do because like, you could get a Facebook
group and they they all get on there. And they ballot stuff and you get garbage.
And so you need to control for

14:22
that. Yeah, I wanted to ask you too, about what types of questions do you all? I
mean, do you see questions like would you recommend your cousin moved to this
town? Is that a question or is it more? Do you like the quality of our streets?
Or what parks? Should we invest money in? What do you typically see? Or is it
kind of all over the place based on what the city needs?

14:45
There are some principles, I think that are worth considering. So first of all,
there are different types of surveys, as you said, like we do a survey. It's a
broad overview of what's important in the city to people and we love to get
what's important. And how are we performing, perform importance performance. And
then you can see if something is important, and we're doing well. Important, and
we're doing poorly, not important. And we're doing well not important, and we're
doing poorly. But you know, it's relative importance. And I think that's really
super important. Sometimes people just get satisfaction with a bunch of things.
But the you don't know the relative inherent inherent importance of any of them.
And so what gets what gets worked on are the things that are rated lowest, and
it could be rated low, and not overly all that important to people, but you're
just doing a poor job at something about that's not important. So so so that's
one thing. So we love to have a broad overview question. But then, like I
mentioned to you that I worked at Coca Cola, right? So if we were trying to
figure out how to expand Fanta among younger people in the evenings or
something, we would want to solve that problem. And we wouldn't want to be
talking about Sprite, we'd be we want to talk about banter, right? And so, so if
if you have a parks need, and the survey has to definitely solve your problem
about the parks. Okay, let me back up a little bit. Like, what's most important?
First of all, keep it short. We avoid ranking questions rank these 10
attributes. It's just a nightmare for people to rank them all, you know, rank
them in order. And then really, we don't care about anybody's ninth or 10th Rank
thing. We care, we care about everybody's top one or two, you know what I mean?
You care about so we avoid those we limit? Some surveys have a lot of questions
like What do you think about this, and they're open ended and they can type. We
like some of those. But but sometimes a resident can take two or three minutes
on an open ended question. You give them five of them, they forgot 15 minutes
into this thing? And you haven't you know what I mean? You've just exhausted
them in three and five questions. So we limit them to just a handful of very
thoughtful open questions. And like, we also believe it or not optimized for the
phone 60s 70% of the people will take a survey on their phone today. And so you
don't want to have them scrolling up and down. So like the We Are we ideally
structure it so that it works perfectly on the phone, and then it works even
better on the computer. You know, so those are just a couple of things that
might be useful.

17:24
Yeah, no, that's very useful. I did want to sort of hone in on something you
said, because I thought it was kind of a very unique way that you present the
data. So I think I heard you just say, Okay, these are our 10 areas of service
delivery in the city, trash, parks, police, whatever. So which ones are the most
important to you? So I would say, oh, Parks is number one. For me, I have a
young family, I like parks. Public safety is important to me. And then I think I
heard you say you, you rate them? Are you satisfied with the parks? Are you
satisfied? So you get then in your data output, which would the way you do it, I
think is very unique. The way you visualize the data is very easy allows you to
go to the service delivery department, whatever the service is, that's the most
important and get some depth in that as opposed to worrying about the things
that are least important that maybe you rated high on Is that am I saying that
right? Yeah.

18:24
Can I show my screen? I can show you I can share like what you're talking about,
right? Yeah,

18:28
yeah, you can share it and then just describe it for the folks on the podcast.
But yeah, on

18:34
the podcast. So here, this is actual data from a real city. And we're looking at
safety and security, right? For this particular city. And in this particular
city, the first thing we want to know is what's listed let me go to growth and
development. That's a that's a this is a better one more more controversial than
safety and security. So growth and development. And so first, on the left hand
side here, and I don't know if you can tell, but we we have a list of 10 items,
and we ask people, which two are most important to them. And so people go
through and they rank there too. And like it's obvious to see what's most
important, like ensuring the infrastructure can support the growth, like the
water and wastewater. And what's less important. Only 4% of the people said, a
proper mix of housing types of is important. And then if these things are
important to people, we ask how the city is doing. And in our example, like this
city here, like the top three most important things, the city's actually doing
pretty good on them. Like they're not flawless, you know, but at least the most
important the top three things they're doing quite well. And it isn't until you
get down to the fourth and the fifth and the sixth most important thing do you
find people are being a little bit disgruntled? Well, probably this city is
ideal, because you know, they should continue to focus on the top three and then
now maybe focus on the fourth. You know what I mean? The thing because they're
doing really well and why waste your time on this thing of right to eight or
nine in order of importance. And so it's really helpful. And in this city, they
probably would have focused on the wrong thing right off the bat. And they
wouldn't things are doing well. Yeah,

20:11
so I want to just share this, again, just verbally to the folks on the podcast,
what we're looking at is a section a category in the survey called growth and
development. So the city's growth, the city's development, so forth. And there
were 10 or 11 questions like rank, rank these in terms of importance, and the
top three were ensure infrastructure can support growth, ensure public streets
and roads can support growth and manage the growth and density of the city.
Those are the top three, like, ah, these are the most three, important three.
And then within those three, are within all of them, actually, you said, How are
we doing? We're doing very good, we're doing okay, and we're doing poorly. And
so this just allows you visually, I mean, you can, if you were seeing this on
the video, you could just instantly see where the problems are, and where the
where the where the opportunities are. So I just liked the way it's laid out,
because you're getting some detail. And then you're asking about quality of
service, which I think he's a very clever way to do it. Yeah.

21:13
Because, interestingly enough, is like, you could spend a lot of time trying to
describe this in words in a summary, like if you if you did an analysis, but a
very clear visualization, it's worth 1000 words, you know, so right here, like
you even eliminate the need to visualize, and then a city could look at this,
and they'd say, Yes, but what are the people who live in area three feel about,
you know, you have like different areas of your city. And so they can quickly
come and say, Oh, we're gonna go look at Area three. And there's 108 58 People
who live in area three, so you know, you have a reasonable representation here,
and you can see what matters to them. And so it's like, very powerful for
somebody who wants to narrow in and solve the problem in a part of the city
that's struggling.

22:02
Yeah, yeah. And I'm gonna, I got a screen grab of that, I'm going to put that in
the show notes as well for people to download. If they'd like to see that visual
that we just were sort of walking through for the folks listening on the
podcast, I want to ask you about the number of respondents needed. You know, how
many do you need to to represent a community if you have 100,000 people or
50,000, say, 50,000 people in your community? Once you get to a certain point
that kind of as diminishing returns? Is that Is that right?

22:38
Yes and no. So we actually love to have a larger sample size than many research
companies do. So really, with 400, or 600, your data is pretty reliable. In the
example that I showed you moments ago, that that city last year had 660, some
responses, and the data was was fine, we were fine. Then when we did it, this
year, they had almost 1200, so nearly double, not quite double. And the data
hardly changed. Right? The data, I mean, it did change a little. And some of
that change could have even been because we had more people who came in from
postage, or you know, a postcard or email because we broadened our invitation.
And, and so the influence is not just so just to tell you, with most research
that I do for most cities, after we get around 400, or 500, or 600, the data
simply doesn't change. Even if we get to 1500. Or even if we get to 2000 It
changes the percent here and there. But the direction is clear. The benefit of a
larger sample is you can dig into a smaller topic. And you can, you can have
confidence with the amount of information you have in a smaller topic. So people
are complaining about the library per se, right? You can you can go to the
comments about the library and you can have enough comments. You're not just
getting five or six or eight comments, you're getting 5060 or 70. And that can
matter, right to help you make a decision. So it just allows you to go deeper,
but the overall is going to be

24:21
Yeah, what what have you what has surprised you, in your work with local
governments? Is it Are they are most cities and counties willing and excited
about this? Or they do they struggle with this idea of investing and research?
Is that surprising to you? Or is it that most citizens are happy? Do you find
that most people like their government? What what's kind of like what do you
what are you learning along the way here?

24:48
Most are positive, really about local government. There. There's hardly a city
that doesn't have a fair number of complainers like 20% or 25% or something like
that. That's pretty real, like so three quarters are happy and 25 percenters say
there's a lot of room for improvement.

25:08
So that's, that's fairly common that spread. Yeah. And

25:11
by the way, I have to remind city leaders, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute,
you know, 73% said you are going in the right direction. And you do have some
who say you're going the wrong direction, which are the 27%. But 73% said,
You're going the right direction. So who you know, and then maybe we can explore
how to improve a little bit for the ones who are complaining. And that's not to
minimize the complaints. I mean, the complaints are vital for them to understand
and to see them and to get their minds around and so forth. But people tend to
be more grateful and more great, you know, have more gratitude. On the other
hand, society is becoming kind of caustic sometimes. Right? And we're seeing
that influence trickle down into cities and the anger and the frustration. So
that comes out. And no, I think that the benefit of some of what we do is help
them see the positives through the trees of the negative that they encounter all
the time. Yeah. Yeah, I

26:08
have a couple other quick questions. As we wrap up here. One of them is Do you
do any sort of internal staff surveys? Or is it all external to these larger
audiences? No,

26:18
no, we do all kinds of surveys for cities, there's a lot of needs. So first of
all, with most cities that we have, they need to do a staff survey as well. And
we do we have a great staff survey. And it's modeled after the same kind of
principles that you saw here. Importance versus performance. Whereas like the
industry standard is not that the industry standard is just like you get a
rating on your attributes, and where you're rated negatively, that's where you
should focus, but you don't know it's relative importance. So So is that and
cities just love it. And they get the same kind of a dashboard thing where you
see, and it's really easy for them to look at it by department and slice and
dice and figure things out. So we do that. But a lot of cities after they've
done a large generic survey, like we do with the big overview about where do we
focus, they'd love to focus in on certain ad issues and do a deep dive. I'm
working with the city right now, where they did the large survey this year, the
top four or five most important issues that residents said they wanted, we're
doing a deep dive, and we're describing what the city may actually do in this
area, what they're thinking about the pros and the cons of doing this. And then
we're finding out if the resident, like thinks that they'll benefit from this,
if they think it's great for the city, if they think it's a wise use of tax
dollars. And if they would even consider a tax increase for these things,
because city leaders go hey, right, they say they want this, but they're not
willing to pay for it. And sometimes that's true. Like it's really real, right?
And we get the answer. But usually, a well presented challenge that really is an
issue facing the city, we're finding the citizens are very supportive. And so
even with a tax increase many times, so it all depends on how important it is.
But

28:00
yeah, I like this idea. I like this idea, though, of a multiple year approach.
Because you're right, you find out something in year one, then in year two, you
can go back and dig deeper in these four areas, and really get some color, some
texture to what people want in detail, as opposed to this broad brush. parting
thought, or I would just like for you to share with with the audience, where you
all are based what your website is, and, and maybe kind of what your unique
contribution is, I was impressed with the visualization part, high level summary
of just being able to see what the results were up at. That was pretty cool. But
if you just share anything kind of unique about you all's approach, and then how
can people get in touch with your website and so forth?

28:49
Yeah, so our website is our company name. So it's onpoint insights.com. But it's
on point with an E, we put an E on the end of it on point with an E and there's
a hyphen in between so onpoint with any hyphen, incites.com. And we have our
websites pretty useful. I think there's a lot of good information out there that
anybody could benefit from looking at. Um, and what makes us unique? All right,
that's a tough one. But let me be. Like, I think our advantage is the fact that
I spent over 25 years helping executives in, in business, make critical
decisions. And you know, we had to live with everything that I produced, like if
we did any research, like I had to live with this, right. And these were also my
friends and peers that I was working with. And so I really wanted to deliver for
them and I learned a thing or two about what they wanted, what they needed, what
was helpful to them. And although it wasn't academic, it was it was applied. We
had To apply this, you know, for real decisions. And so my approach to, to
designing a survey is like I almost designed the survey with the analysis in
mind, like, what am I going to present? What how am I going to help them make
decisions with this thing? And so the questions I don't like say, hey, let's ask
this question, hey, let's ask that question lets us in and we just throw
questions out there, and then try to figure out how we can make, you know,
something meaningful out of that. Every question is thoughtfully designed to
help with a critical decision. And so working in harmony, that data, acid in the
right way for the right kind of visualization for the right kind of analysis,
makes it so that you can have a short analysis as a matter of fact, a clear
analysis, and you can know exactly where to go. And so I would say that's the
advantage, the advantage is having been bruised and broken and beat up and, and
made mistakes and, and realize this didn't work out very well. And you figure
out how to do it better. And, and, and now I'm applying that to people who work
in government and helping them with it, you know, and for people who kind of
want that to help guide them like we're the ideal candidate, their ideal
company, for people who kind of want the academic approach where you get a big,
long 200 page report at the end. Somebody else is probably the better company
for them, you know? So I'd say that's the major difference.

31:29
Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Thank you. So our guest today, and thank you is Ron
Gailey. Thank you, Ron, for being with us. And as I mentioned earlier, on point
insights, O N, poi, and Te dash insights.com is their website and really
appreciate you taking

31:48
my email is Ron

31:49
at onpoint insights.com. So yeah, oh, there we go. Easy, Ron at onpoint dash
insights.com. Yeah, and thank you for taking us through this. I just we're a
firm believer here at leader. Gov, of, let's be sure we really understand where
we're trying to go, and what our motivations are and what our stakeholders are
saying to us. And again, if you're a department head with three people doing,
you know, filling potholes, we still need to engage our stakeholders and get
their perspectives and inputs in what we're doing. If you're the director of
finance, it's talking to department heads about how you're doing and getting
yourself you know, a survey together to find out how you can better serve the
people that you're serving. And that's the kind of the heart of local government
its service. So we need to be sure we're doing a good job serving the people
we're supposed to serve. So thank you very much for being here, Ron, and for our
listeners, any topic that you want to hear on one of our future podcasts, please
let us know and we hope you have a great day. Take care and we'll see you next
time. Thank you

 

 

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