Frequently Asked Questions

• How does FlashVote ensure a demographic sample that mirrors community make-up?
  Residents provide demographic information when they sign-up and when answering survey questions. We also review anonymized panel demographics with you. If a certain demographic is not adequately represented, targeted outreach can be done to meet your data needs.
• Are you able to target certain wards or neighborhoods? How granular can you get?
  Yes. Our participant addresses are geocoded down to a point on a map, so there is no limit on granularity for targeting or analysis. We typically overlay sub-districts like electoral wards, service districts or quadrants so you can easily use them as results filters for every survey.
• Can you produce the surveys in other languages we want?
  Yes. We can provide professionally translated surveys in the languages you need. Spanish is the most popular and each language is an additional cost. However, our survey readability target is 8th grade English, with the goal of being accessible to all residents, including those with English as a second language.
• How are you different from citizen engagement tools?
  Citizen engagement is very different from scientific surveying. Engagement is used to get input from people especially interested in a topic. Scientific surveys are used to get input from regular people who are NOT especially interested in a topic. So the only way to get representative community input that you can generalize to your whole community is to use a scientific survey method. Citizen engagement tools are good for interacting with individual members of the public with project passions, and to ask open-ended questions seeking facts or ideas. But they are not a way to understand the community as a whole. FlashVote is a patent-pending multi-channel (web/text/phone) scientific survey system that delivers statistically valid community input in 48 hours. We have customers that also use citizen engagement tools for Q&A or discussion forums, but they rely on FlashVote for decision-quality data.
• How are you different from other scientific surveys?
  Traditional scientific surveys typically cost $20k to $50k each. This means six important topics/surveys in a year would cost $120k to $300k. Those costs have prevented most local governments from getting the data they need throughout the year. We made it our goal to cut that cost by 90%, and to improve data quality in an age of plummeting phone and mail response rates. We also reduced the turnaround time for results from many months to just 48 hours.
• Why is your price so low for scientific survey data?
  Our mission is to make great data and great decisions affordable for every government, so we’ve invested years of research and millions of dollars of development to automate everything we can. That’s how we deliver highly reliable data at a highly affordable price, even though we still write the questions for you and give you super responsive customer service.