So disengaged from its residents the Town of Aurora’s Communications department has decided the way they’re going to get to know us better is by engaging us with the one thing that has proven not to work up to this point; another survey.
Here’s a snapshot of the recent announcement on the town’s website:
Remember this department’s 2009 “Web satisfaction survey”?
The result of which was an additional $90,000 spend on a website update that was anything but satisfactory.
The project was late to launch: https://wattstrending.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/town-of-auroras-website-roll-out/
The landing page held misleading content: https://wattstrending.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/the-fresh-prince-over-there/
And search capability is anything but “powerful” and large portions of data were removed entirely:
https://wattstrending.wordpress.com/2014/08/19/out-of-site-out-of-mind/
It appears that not much has improved over the past 5 years as the findings from their most recent survey, the Citizen Budget were inconclusive. Here is a February 4th article from The Auroran that reported this survey announced the most common response was a request for a 10 per cent reduction in Cultural Services:
http://www.newspapers-online.com/auroran/?p=9731
The problem with the survey is was it wasn’t specific enough to determine which cultural services were to be reduced.
“It may be that ‘cultural services’ is so encompassing that many people may not relate it to special events. Maybe that is something we can look into.”
Whose professional approach was it exactly to construct and execute a survey in such a way that it did not ask specific questions?
Look into?
Is this going to be “looked into” in the same way as the Communication’s Department approach to social video I commented on here:
https://wattstrending.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/price-glamour-inaction/
The video posted back in March of 2014, that used data from 2012, has absolutely no bearing on the 2015 budget yet there it is on the web page under budget resources:
On YouTube we see the R.O.I. on the $2,500 spend for this video is less than 1000 views.
R.O.I. is a real issue with the Communications Department which is trending away from sustainability at an alarming rate.
I’ve commented on this in several previous posts. To recap over the past 5 years we’ve seen a 67% increase, which ammounts to a $200,000 spend. Here is a breakdown of costings by year:
2009 – $389,900
2010 – $455,700
2011 – $490,800
2012 – $507,100
2013 – $540,000
2014 – $580,000
Here are this year’s budget numbers, along with the projections for the next 3:
Over 10 years we’ll have seen an increase of $320,000.
That is almost double the 2009 budget.
Budgets that lack the integrity of the very survey questions that are being used to support them.
It clearly doesn’t matter what the survey says, because:
Instead of dropping thousands on having cheesy videos created that tell us nothing, or posting budget meetings to the town’s YouTube showing council unwilling to ask the tough questions why not buy the rights to Sting’s 1985 classic Love is The Seventh Wave and change the lyrics to :
“In the empire of nonsense’s
You’re the meme of all you survey.
There is no deeper debt than this
Rising in the land
There is no deeper debt than this
Nothing will withstand”
Watts Trending 