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New: Community Monitor

Ken Van Mechelen avatar
Written by Ken Van Mechelen
Updated this week

What is the Community Monitor?

The Community Monitoring Survey is an “always-on” survey designed to continuously capture resident sentiment and provide long‑term insights.

It delivers:

  • Strategic value: Acts as an early warning system for declining satisfaction in trust, services, or quality of life. Helps policy makers act proactively rather than reactively.

  • Cost & resource efficiency: More affordable and efficient than manually administered surveys. It continuously collects data and streamlines analysis directly within the platform, reducing reliance on external consultants.

  • A culture of engagement: Because the survey is always available, it normalizes ongoing feedback, builds trust, and offers a low‑barrier way for residents to share input.

How and what data is managed in the Community Monitor?

How data is collected and used

  • Answer frequency: Residents can only submit the survey once per quarter.

  • Duplicate prevention: Fingerprinting helps limit multiple submissions from the same device, but it’s possible for one user to submit more than once if they use different devices or networks.

The Live Monitor Dashboard

The Live Monitor Dashboard provides a top‑level “Health Score” and category breakdown:

  • Governance & Trust

  • Community Life

  • Services

  • Other (for any additional questions admins added)

What you can do in the dashboard:

  • View scores per quarter and switch between quarters.

  • Track quarter‑over‑quarter trends and benchmarking.

How is the Health Score calculated?

  • The Health Score is the average of all sentiment questions.

  • Each default question contributes to one of the three main pillars.

  • Newly added questions:

    • Are automatically categorized as Other.

    • Their scores are included in both the Other category average and the Overall Health Score.

How to set up the Community Monitor?

1. Access the feature

  • Find the survey under the Community Monitor tab in the admin panel.

  • If the tab isn’t visible, the feature hasn’t been purchased. Contact your Government Success Manager or Support.

2. General settings & survey creation

  • Use the General Settings tab to build your survey.

  • By default, 11 sentiment scale questions across Quality of Life, Service Delivery, and Governance & Trust are included. These can be edited.

  • Add new sentiment questions if needed. These appear under the “Other” category in the dashboard (they don’t slot into the three default pillars).

  • Optionally, add demographic questions.

3. Pop‑up settings

  • Pop‑ups appear only when:

    • Submissions are being accepted.

    • The resident hasn’t seen the pop‑up or submitted a survey in the past 3 months.

  • Pop‑ups trigger on homepage load, custom pages, event registrations, voting, or when returning to a project page after submitting a survey.

  • Admins can set the number of times a pop‑up appears per quarter, or disable it entirely by setting the frequency to 0.

  • A homepage widget can also be added via the homepage builder.

4. Access rights

  • Configure who can participate (open to all or restricted to registered users).

  • If set to “none” (no login required), users can answer anonymously, but device/IP fingerprinting used to prevent duplicate submissions is not foolproof.

How to view the responses?

  • Qualitative analysis: Turn on “ask follow up” in the survey builder to enable AI to analyze open‑ended responses.

  • Download raw data: Go to General Settings → click the 3 dots next to Edit Survey → Download survey results.

How to create quarterly reports?

  • Go to the Reporting tab.

  • Select the “Community Monitor” template and generate an auto‑populated report with one click.

  • Use the Survey Question Widget to filter and analyze responses by registration fields for a demographic breakdown.

  • At the start of each quarter, admins automatically receive an email with the report for the previous quarter.

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