When I had made the recommendation to the city council to remove city employees from the survey mailing list, I made the assumption that a survey company would already be doing that, I guess not. Legislative advisor and council errand boy, Jim David said this in the informational yesterday (FF 25:30):

. . . request to remove city employees from that list and they seemed agreeable to that . . . no city employee or council member will receive these surveys . . .

I had made the suggestion because I thought it would skew the results a bit if these were being mailed to city employees. You have to realize, they only mail out 3,000 of these and the response rate is around 32%.

What surprised me was that this seems like the first time the city has told the survey company to do this. Not that this is the city’s fault, besides they hire the company to do a fair survey, right? You would think that the company would already be purging those people, but apparently in the past they have not.

I was also a little astonished when Jim said, “they seemed agreeable” Well I damn well hope so. It is unfortunate that a citizen has to point out something that should have been done already by the survey company.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbQxGZOCNyg[/youtube]

3 Thoughts on “Sioux Falls Citizen Survey to remove employees from mailing list

  1. rufusx on October 21, 2014 at 4:34 pm said:

    Good job there Ehrisman. We might make a scientist out of you yet.

  2. Well Ruf, I don’t really talk about it much, but I have worked in printing, design and direct mail for over 20 years, these are ‘little’ things a survey company should be doing OR not doing.

  3. Really on October 21, 2014 at 7:08 pm said:

    Come on now, are you gonna take away their right to vote too? Don’t you believe in their 1st amendment rights too? Honestly probably less than 1% would get a survey. If they did, they should also have the right to fill it out. It is a random sampling that should reflect the entire population. How big do you cast your net of exclusion? Any one that works with the City or even does business with the City too plus their employees????

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