Best Value consultation with Snap Survey Software and services
January 2002
Best Value is a framework set out at UK national government level which local and statutory authorities are expected to follow to monitor and audit the appropriateness and cost-effectiveness of all the services they provide. A key component of the Best Value review process is consultation with the people who use or should benefit from those services. Best Value recognizes that simply going for the cheapest option does not necessarily provide what people want, if the service is inappropriate or misses the point somehow: it may turn out to be very poor value with the benefit of hindsight.
There are numerous ways to carry out consultation, from ad hoc soundings through to citizens' panels. Many of the bodies engaged in Best Value review, such as councils, housing associations and health authorities, are finding that the most reliable and rigorous ways to engage in consultation is to use a well-designed, efficiently administered survey set up in Snap. This month, we feature two local councils who are seeing the benefits of Snap surveys in providing rich information and insight, so that priorities are easier to set and difficult funding or policy decisions become easier to take. One is using Snap 6 in house to get the information flowing, the other has tapped into the skill and expertise available at Snap Surveys to offload certain tasks, where resources are limited, in a cost-effective way.
East Northamptonshire Council takes a joined-up approach to Best Value consultation with Snap 6
East Northamptonshire District Council is creating its own survey capability based on Snap 6, to carry out consultation exercises as a part of its commitment to the Best Value framework. Moving from another local authority where he had used Snap, Head of Leisure & Tourism, Rod Nipper was an advocate for East Northamptonshire acquiring Snap for use across departments for consultation activities among residents and service users.
"It was for a customer survey of people who use leisure centres that I suggested we use Snap to generate the survey form and also generate the analysis. My colleagues were impressed, so we decided to purchase three Snap 6 licences."
The first survey was reproduced in the council's newsletters sent to all residents. With an anticipated response of several hundred returns, the results are being keyed in at the council offices for analysis and interpretation in Snap.
"The point about Best Value is there is an ongoing role for consultation with your customers. The reason we were interested in Snap is because it is a tool that our staff can use for themselves. When, every 12 months, you have to survey facilities such as leisure centres, it can get expensive if you use consultants. With Snap, we can produce our own surveys, pilot new ones or revise existing ones, and add to them year on year."
By purchasing three networked Snap licences, the software can be used by any three users in any department at any one time, providing a cost-effective solution for many different teams. The only ongoing cost is a modest annual maintenance charge, which brings upgrades and access to the Snap HelpDesk. By working across departments, Rod is hopeful that knowledge and experience can be pooled, and importantly, that the measurements and results will be comparable throughout the council for all its consultation exercises.
"The beauty of using Snap is that the analysis module is powerful and very flexible. It allows you to go back and analyze your data at a later date from a different angle. Year on year we can build trends. Quite often that is the most useful part of the consultation. It means you are getting 'best value' from the research process as well!"
Initially, a small group of Best Value officers were trained in Snap. They all found it easy to pick up and were relieved that the manuals also proved to be accessible and full of useful examples. One of the group had even designed a questionnaire before going on the course simply following one of the tutorials in the manual.
"Now the challenge is to get staff to think carefully about what they require from their questionnaires and how the questions should be worded to achieve this - like avoiding double negatives in their questions! Hopefully with Snap as a council resource this will help because "pilot questionnaires" can be produced quickly and easily and used to gather test data. This should show up any pitfalls before committing to the expense of a full blown production."
The garbage in but no garbage out at Sevenoaks: SurveyShop consultation project brings innovation in council's refuse collection regime
A Best Value consultation for Sevenoaks District Council's Direct Services department, carried out as a survey by the Snap SurveyShop Research Team, has provided the council with some very clear guidance about levels of satisfaction with current service provision and information to help the future shape of its services. Sevenoaks, situated in the rolling countryside of Kent at the point where it merges into London, has a population of 112,000 in some 48,000 households. The District Council has just completed a Best Value Review of three council responsibilities: waste collection, recycling and the provision of public lavatories.
Richard Wilson, head of Direct Services, explained his decision to use a widely-distributed self-completion survey: "A fundamental requirement of Best Value is to undertake extensive consultation. We wanted the widest consultation possible - to look at satisfaction with what we do at present and more importantly, what people would like us to do in the future."
Richard invited four companies to come up with a proposal for the work and recommend the methodology, including the optimum sample size. The contract went to SurveyShop, which had suggested a postal survey based on a sample of 4,000, which would be significant to within 3%. SurveyShop also included a reminder mailing in its bid, to boost the response rate.
SurveyShop consultants worked closely with Richard Wilson to design and write the survey. He commented: "It has been quite an interesting exercise as I never met them in person: it was all been done by e-mail and on the phone. We've spoken many times, and it's worked really well."
SurveyShop distributed the questionnaires and after an interval, sent the promised reminder to those not responding. Data entry was undertaken in house by SurveyShop. This successfully increased the response to 33%, giving over 1300 returns to analyze: well above SurveyShop's recommended minimum of 1100 to provide reliable results.
"When we specified the contract we said we wanted the consultant to pull out the analysis and present it to us in an easy to understand format. The presentation was excellent - very easy to understand and very easy for me to reproduce in a bigger report for our council members. The results made very interesting reading."
Satisfaction was very high - 94% for waste collection and 90% for recycling. It was less for public toilets, as Richard expected, at 67%, though 43% of those surveyed had used the facilities.
Sevenoaks were keen to find out if the residents wanted to switch to a wheeled bin collection system but from the survey a picture emerged that residents were extremely satisfied with the existing black sack waste collection regime and were not keen on the change. With its high start-up costs and the tendency for waste volumes collected to increase by around 20%, sticking with black sacks will save considerable expense on collection and disposal costs.
The two main barriers to recycling that emerged were remembering which week recyclables would be collected in the existing alternate-week collection, and finding space to store recyclable waste during this period. A strong option emerging is to give consideration to moving to weekly collection of recyclables from the kerbside. And with public toilets, residents felt it was important for them to be provided, but maintained in a better state. In future, expenditure will be rationalized to focus on upgrading the most well-used locations to a higher standard.
Looking back, Richard viewed the project as a great success. "For us, it was a relatively expensive exercise," he said, "but the outputs have given us good value for money. We've got all the answers we were looking for - we missed nothing we wanted to cover - and will use this information to shape the services in the future. It is influencing council policy and will potentially lead to a continuous improvement in service delivery."
Snap and SurveyShop are the logical choices for Best Value reviewers
It's hard to think of a better endorsement, when local government officers engaged in the Best Value review process describe the software and services used for their consultation as having "given us good value for money" and giving "Best Value from the consultation process as well".
Snap offers flexibility in carrying out all the stages of a survey, from designing the questionnaire to communicating the results to a critical audience or busy decision makers, without requiring huge effort or great technical skill. Its cost of ownership is low, not just in licence fees, but in the time required to master the package and the time saved in using it. If there are problems, these are almost always resolved quickly with a single call to the Snap Surveys HelpDesk.
More importantly, every day, people are finding the results they get from Snap, as Richard Wilson comments, "make for very interesting reading" and can facilitate quite radical policy changes that, true to Best Value, balance saving money with improving satisfaction.