Before the Wilmette Park District board approved a contract to aQity Research for that company to survey district residents on what they want to see at Gillson and Langdon parks, Commissioner Bryan Abbott told aQity President Jeff Andreasen the survey needed to help restart conversation about the lakefront’s future.
“It’s not just a matter of getting good data,” Abbott said at the park board’s Oct. 12 meeting. “It’s about listening.”
He said the park district “went through a six-year process (of creating a lakefront plan), and now we’re sort of rebooting the process.” Abbot referred to the years the park board spent putting together a master plan, only to see the bond referendum request needed to finance that plan fail at the polls last April.
Andreasen assured Abbott and the rest of the board that he expected to get far more responses than the 500 minimally required by the park district. He said he hoped to generate a much higher response rate.
The contract calls for paying aQity between $30,300 and $38,900, depending on how many mail, online or phone survey responses – between 500 and 2,000 – the company gets.
The high end would represent about 20 percent of 10,000 households, Andreasen said. That is about the number of households in the district, which is roughly contiguous to Wilmette’s borders.
Now that the contract has been approved, Andreasen’s team will hold a public meeting with park district officials and representatives of three community groups to talk about what should go into the survey.
Those groups, Commissioner Shelley Shelly said, will be Go Green Wilmette and the groups that supported and opposed the board’s failed lakefront plan referendum request last April: Wilmette Lakefront Friends and Save Wilmette Beaches, respectively.
Kathy Bingham, the district’s recreation superintendent, said Oct. 13 that she hoped by the end of the week to find a date for that meeting.
After getting input at the meeting, Andreasen’s team will create the survey and disseminate either a hard copy of the survey or postcards pointing recipients to an online version of the full survey. That will be sent to the roughly 10,000 households in the district. Shelly said anyone who gets the postcard but doesn’t want to complete the survey’s online version can contact the district and get a full survey mailed to him or her.
aQity will also do phone interview versions of the survey, if the number of responses fails to show returns from all district demographics, Andreasen said.
“We don’t just want a large response, we want a representative response,” he said.
Bingham said Oct. 13 that representative responses would include broad geographic and demographic representation.
“For instance, if we see we’re only getting responses from families with children, we know that that’s not representative of the community as a whole, so (aQity) would look to find other district residents,” she said.
Andreasen said at the meeting that if his team can create and send out the survey by mid-November, he could have results, including data analysis and more general commentary, in district hands by mid- to late January.
If the survey can’t go out at that point, it would be better to skip December, when there are traditionally a lot of holidays that can interfere with getting people to respond, and start the process in January, getting results back in February, he said.
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy.
More Top Picks Essential Oil Diffusers
Lakefront reboot
Who: Wilmette Park District
What: community-wide survey
By: Evanston-based aQity Research
Completion goal: mid-January, 2016