Dog park 4 us
I live in a wonderful community with fantastic neighbors. We support and lookout for each other. We started hanging out with our dogs around the same time in an open un-fenced field.
Understandingly, not everyone likes or is comfortable around dogs. So we decided to petition the city to build a dog park for us. We created a change.org petition where we gathered signatures and gauged the larger communities interest. Along with the petition, we also created dogpark4us.com to provide more information.
The city council was supportive but punted our petition to the parks department. The park’s department started off supportive at first. They asked if we could gauge the community’s interest by conducting a door-to-door survey.
In-person survey challenges
A few neighbors got together to work on a strategy. We created a simple survey and tried knocking door-to-door to collect responses. The response rate was abysmal. The poor showing could have been for any number of reasons. People might have not been home thanks to return-to-work policies. Or people might still seem wary of strangers post-pandemic.
Online survey solution
We decided to change strategy when it became clear that we didn’t have enough time to gather enough survey responses. There are three things we needed:
- Get people to respond honestly to the survey
- Avoid duplicate responses to prevent skewed data
- Track who had not responded in order to re-target
I decided to create a survey that people could fill on their own time using an online form. I embed a QR code that we associated with an address. We easily left the survey at each door in a few afternoons.
I didn’t have much time build a whole web-app. Instead, the QR code pointed to a short Typeform. Unlike Google Forms, Typeform allowed me to include a hidden field value in the URL that I used for tracking.
I wrote a command-line tool to generate the survey flyers. As my neighbors distributed the flyers they would record the address and associated flyer code.
If someone submitted the survey from the same QR code we could see it. We could also see who had not submitted the survey response.
Architecture
This command-line tool was written in javascript and uses FPDF to generate PDF files that we printed.
The link in the QR code pointed to a Typeform survey with a hidden field that contained a unique identifier. Typeform functioned as the database where we could see who had responded and who had not.