Norwood officials report 603 survey responses, plan phased follow-up and outreach

Norwood City Council members reviewing early results of a city community survey said 603 responses had been completed so far, with about 72–73% of respondents saying they live in Norwood and roughly 30 respondents requesting to speak with a council member.

Council members said the responses include mixed levels of contact information: some provided phone numbers or email addresses, some provided both, and some provided none. They discussed a phased follow-up strategy that would begin contacting respondents before the survey closes and a tracking method to avoid duplicate outreach.

Council members and staff described several practical steps to manage follow-up and expand participation. They agreed a shared spreadsheet should record outreach attempts and outcomes (for example, “attempted contact” or “answered”), and several members volunteered to divide respondents by topic or committee for more targeted contact. The group discussed using distinct QR codes on flyers, park signs, and business bulletin boards to gauge where respondents learned about the survey and which outreach channels are most effective.

Discussion covered survey quality-control questions: one individual submitted the same survey five or six times from the same IP address with repeated, non substantive responses; participants said obvious spam or incomplete submissions would be identified and excluded from analysis. Members also discussed how to handle partially completed surveys and whether to set a minimum completion threshold for including a respondent’s answers in different analyses.

On distribution, council members proposed targeted outreach through public schools, churches, the chamber of commerce, community center and library bulletin boards, park signs (including soccer fields), and selective business locations. They estimated small yard-sign style signs would cost about $6 each and discussed whether the expense could be covered through the council’s discretionary budget or paid for directly while staff completes the city purchase-order process.

Timing and targets were raised: members said an earlier internal goal was roughly 1,300 completed surveys as a reasonable sample for a population around 20,000, with 2,000 noted as an upper bound. They discussed that the effective adult population (18+) would be smaller than total population and that social-media distribution will bias responses toward more digitally active residents. Members agreed to report question-by-question response counts when releasing results so readers can see that not every question will have the same number of answers.

Next steps recorded in the committee discussion included: creating and sharing a Google Sheet to manage outreach and to tag which members dropped off flyers or contacted businesses; using multiple, trackable QR codes for park, business and council distributions; and starting phased contact with respondents who requested to speak. Several council members volunteered to prepare the shared document and to follow up with staff (including a request that staff verify access permissions to the exported survey data). The committee did not take any formal vote on these steps during the meeting.

Members emphasized protecting personally identifiable information when reporting findings: outreach tracking would be internal and the published survey report would present aggregated or generalized themes rather than individual contact details.

Clarifying details and numeric specifics from the meeting are recorded below.