Darebin’s survey activity delivers results as council reaches out to community sectors.

One of the largest communities in the State of Victoria, the City of Darebin encompasses 53 square kilometres from Melbourne’s inner northern suburbs of Northcote and Fairfield out to the traditional middle ring suburbs of Reservoir and Bundoora.

Over 128,000 people call Darebin home and they make up one of the most diverse communities anywhere in Australia. One in three Darebin residents was born in a non-English speaking country with more than 40 per cent of Darebin residents speaking a language other than English.

The major contributing countries are Italy, Greece, the United Kingdom, China and Vietnam, but significant growth is being experienced in the community of people born in Sri Lanka, India, Egypt, the Philippines and countries from across the Middle East. Over 1,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders make this one of the largest indigenous communities anywhere in metropolitan Victoria.

The council needs to address a multitude of challenges in servicing its residents. One in five Darebin residents are aged over 60, one in seven households earn less than $15,000 a year, and over 4,000 Darebin residents are the principal carer of a person with a disability.

This diverse range of issues and social demographics presents some unique and complex issues when collecting data and gauging the success of services being delivered to residents.

Senior Research Officer, Karin Linden, heads up the City of Darebin’s research program which surveys residents and service users regularly to ensure that what the Council delivers is what residents need. “We focus on continuous improvement in our services and demonstrating genuine care on the part of the Council,” says Linden. “The regular surveying activity is essential to providing us with direction as well as helping to ensure that our services are meeting all of our community’s needs.”

Two years ago, the Council selected QuestDesigner (developed by QuestMetrics) for its survey and complex questionnaire design platform. The powerful yet easy to use application is easily customised, generating a powerful library of re-usable questionnaire elements, and encouraging re-use and consistency in the wide range of deployment methods the council requires. The Council currently deploys surveys in electronic format through the QuestServer web platform, uses telephone operators to run CATI surveys, and generates high quality paper surveys from QuestDesigner for mailed and face-to-face surveying.

“We carry out more surveys than any other Victorian local council and the QuestMetrics tool is critical to how we consult with residents,” says Linden. In the last two years over 100 medium to large surveys have been undertaken using QuestMetric’s tool, a significant increase on previous years delivering significant savings over all previous surveying methods.

Linden explains that the application is flexible and extremely intuitive to use. “There’s no need to be an IT expert even when designing new surveys using QuestDesigner. You simply drag and drop from preset question templates or create your own questions. It has all the elements that a high profile market research organisation would be using without the associated complexity or price tag, yet it is able to handle extremely complex survey requirements” says a confident Linden.

The council has enjoyed savings since adopting QuestDesigner through the removal of errors during rework and review activities – a round trip process.

The Council conducts all survey design and deployment internally, and prefers using QuestDesigner over all other all survey deployment methods.

“This is due to the difficulty in maintaining the compatibility and synchronisation of the deployed surveys with the source documentation. With each survey’s deployment being sourced from a common project we avoid all of these issues, and this is where QuestDesigner is just streets ahead,” says Linden.

Surveys are promoted through announcements in papers, the mail, the council’s website and newsletters. Online surveys are one popular option, with hard copy format made available for those not comfortable with the online option. Those being surveyed access the questionnaire through a link, filling in their questionnaires online and simply pressing the submit button. Interested residents can also go to one of the four municipal libraries and use the free access computers.

Real-time basic analysis and respondent status is provided as standard, allowing close monitoring of surveys and early identification of any trend and immediate warning of any potential problem. Where in-depth analysis is required, the results are easily populated into well known research analysis packages, Excel, or other external databases.

As a highly multicultural community it was important that QuestMetric’s tool be able to support other languages. Darebin is in the process of building up a library of identical questions in English, Italian and Greek to allow surveys to be carried out in residents’ and service users’ languages.

Telephone interviews are undertaken with answers entered online immediately by the interviewer. “Our multicultural residents love our calls made in their own language and are always keen to participate in the surveys. We had an outstanding response to our Home Help survey held last December in three languages,” says Linden.

The survey results and analysis generated by the QuestMetrics tools are used by Darebin for ongoing council strategy planning and building on its continuous improvement drivers.

QuestMetrics’ CEO, Jason Sobell, reveals that QuestDesigner is the result of his desire to improve the research/interview design and distribution process whilst working within a research firm. “We were creating and deploying surveys using market leading tools but found it to be a very inefficient process. Within two years, QuestDesigner and QuestServer were launched on the market providing an end to end solution for the design and deployment of advanced surveys, and the subsequent data collection.”

The company is soon to release updated versions of its QuestDesigner and QuestServer applications. “Because we use an open standard, the data is highly portable and, therefore, future-safe,” says Sobell. It is this open architecture that differentiates QuestMetrics from other survey designers on the market. “It’s about flexibility and being able to create complex surveys without the constraints of existing proprietary solutions,” concludes Sobell.