Creating a first-of-its-kind community engagement platform: Why we joined forces with Elucd
Ido Ivri
CTO & Co-Founder
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When Eyal and I started Zencity five years ago, we set out to create a product that would facilitate a city-scale understanding of public opinion and sentiment by collecting and analyzing openly available data streams, such as social media and news. We wanted to enable local government leaders to effortlessly incorporate public opinion into their decision-making, thereby increasing community trust in their policies and actions.
A new kind of community engagement solution
Elucd’s core technology, now integrated into the Zencity platform, allows the same city-scale understanding of public opinion. It does this through continuous, lightweight polling of residents across the multiple digital platforms they’re using, capturing a representative sample of community input by reaching members where they are. This input allows decision-makers to understand how people of different ethnicities, genders, ages, incomes, and languages – from all districts and neighborhoods – feel about their city or county and gives civic leaders a sense of how their community members’ needs and attitudes change over time.
Combining Zencity’s core, AI-powered analysis, and Elucd’s representative and statistically valid polling brings us into one of the most significant chapters in Zencity. We are combining the two technologies to offer an unprecedented opportunity for engaging your community: the next-gen community survey.
Nextgen community surveys
Our revolutionary next-gen community surveys will combine “always-on,” recurring resident polling with Zencity’s layer of social conversation analysis. This enables civic leaders to finally see changes in public opinion alongside the context and reasoning behind those trends. This unique solution will allow local governments to power their planning and decision-making with the most comprehensive resident engagement data.
Here’s what sets Zencity’s solution apart:
Continuous polling vs. periodic polling: Unlike a traditional community survey that runs for a limited period of time, continuous polling's data flows year-round, so when there’s a change in resident attitudes, it will be noticeable and addressable in a timely manner.
Combining organic conversations and proactive engagement via surveys vs. only running a survey: Piecing together how residents rate their jurisdiction and its services and why they might respond the way they require more than surveys. Combining surveys that provide statistically significant, quantifiable evidence and organic conversations which may explain sentiment leading to the quantifiable trend (e.g. conversations about public safety or lack thereof may be an indicator of why safety scores are low in a city), is invaluable.
High-resolution input vs. low-resolution: The collected data represents the community, including hard-to-reach groups. It can be broken down by ethnicity, gender, age, income, language, and district or neighborhood, ensuring that local leaders hear from all corners of their community and receive representative and inclusive feedback.
Open-ended question analysis vs. fixed-response questions only: Zencity has a unique, AI-powered ability to analyze natural language, so we can quickly find patterns in a high velocity of unstructured data, namely, answers to open-ended questions. This allows us to include open-ended questions on any topic in our surveys and provide real-time analysis of patterns and topics that residents are raising, providing another dimension to understanding resident opinions.
Benchmark and ad-hoc questions vs. mostly benchmark questions: Most community surveys emphasized year-over-year benchmarks. While this is important, 2020 has highlighted how dynamic reality can be, so our tool will enable both a continuous benchmark and add ad-hoc questions about current events and initiatives. We think it’s equally important to measure performance quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year, but also to gain insight into opinions on current local government undertakings (e.g., revamping the city center, passing GO bonds, COVID and vaccine-related policies, federal relief funding allocations, primary legislation, and more).
We are super excited about this new community survey product and view it as a definitive step towards realizing our more excellent vision of equipping government organizations of all kinds – cities, counties, police departments, state agencies, and more – with the essential technology they need to make decisions with quality resident engagement data in hand. We eagerly anticipate watching local and state governments adopt this groundbreaking solution and use it to impact the lives of residents everywhere.
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