Share your thoughts with the City and become eligible to win a $100 gift card!
What services should the city government prioritize? How do you want to make your voice heard? Do you think Portland is moving in the right direction? Tell your 12 new city council members and new mayor through the 2024 Portland Insights Survey and enter to win one of fifty $100 Amazon gift cards.
If you are one of the 20,000 households randomly selected to participate in the survey, you’ll receive this invitation letter from Portland State University. Make sure to fill it out!
Sign up for Email updates!
Whether you received the letter or not, you can sign up to receive email updates about the survey results.
What is the Insights Survey?
Starting in fall 2022, the City adopted a new approach to gather your thoughts on our services, policy decisions, and budget plans. We named it the Portland Insights Survey. Our aim is to ensure that every Portlander, especially those who have historically been underserved, is represented and heard in our government.
In collaboration with the Portland City Budget Office and the Regional Research Institute for Human Services (RRI) at Portland State University (PSU), we’ve been working diligently to understand community perceptions and needs.
Why Your Input Matters
The survey aims to:
- Develop a comprehensive understanding of Portlanders’ perceptions of city government and its services.
- Incorporate this valuable feedback into performance evaluations of the City’s programs and services.
- Inform the city’s budget development and policy-making processes to create more equitable and data-driven administrative practices.
The 2024 survey is now open, and we are eager to hear from you! The survey questions have been updated from the 2022 version to better reflect current priorities and will provide crucial insights for our 12 new council members and mayor starting in 2025.
We look forward to your participation. Share your thoughts, make your voice heard, and you might just win a gift card! Thank you for helping us shape a better Portland.
How do I view prior years’ survey and focus group reports?
The first round of the survey was conducted in the fall/winter of 2022 and will be administered every two years. This representative and generalizable survey provided valuable data and insights for both the City government and the Portland community.
To complement the survey's qualitative findings, focus group discussions were held in 2023 with the help of our PSU and community partners. These discussions, along with qualitative comments from the 2022 survey, were used to create a detailed qualitative report. This report offers a narrative of people’s perspectives and experiences that aren’t captured in the quantitative data.
You can explore the previous years' Portland Insights results, both quantitative and qualitative, through our online interactive report and PDF versions:
FAQs
How are we gathering input?
Through the Portland Insights Survey, the City of Portland conducts a survey (quantitative data) one year and gather feedback through focus-group discussions (qualitative data) the next year. This approach allows us to understand the perspectives of all Portlanders in a nuanced way. We are working with the Regional Research Institute at Portland State University to design and conduct the survey and the discussions.
In addition to an English version, the survey questions have been translated into Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Ukrainian, which are the five most spoken, non-English languages in Portland. The quantitative survey is available online, on paper, and via the phone.
How did we select survey participants?
We used a hybrid approach, which consisted of a randomized, mail survey and an opt-in survey option for historically underrepresented communities to recruit survey participants.
20,000 Portland households were randomly selected to receive an invitation letter to fill out the survey. In addition, we partnered with community organizations to provide the opt-in survey and directly engage with communities for which the traditional means of outreach (eg. townhall meetings, listening sessions) have not served well. Our PSU partner combined and analyzed the data gathered through both methods.
How did we conduct multicultural outreach?
The City of Portland is committed to having an inclusionary and equity-forward outreach plan around the Portland Insights Survey, as part of its commitment to the City’s Core Values. One of the ways to reach more Portlanders was through close partnerships with City’s Employee Resource Groups and community-based organizations, including:
- Community Engagement Liaison Services (CELs)
- The Miracles Club
- Multnomah County Youth Commission
- Portland All Nations Canoe Family
- Rosewood Initiative
These community organizations reach the communities they serve directly or work with other organizations within their network.
What happens next?
After the survey closes in mid-summer, PSU will analyze the survey input in the following months. Results will be shared in early 2025.
Sign up to receive updates about the survey results.
In addition to the survey, qualitative focus group conversations will be conducted in 2025. These conversations will further explore people’s perspectives and experiences, and compliment the quantitative survey results.
How do we protect participants’ privacy?
Data collected through the web survey are only accessible to the members of the PSU research team. Data collected through the paper surveys are received by and stored at PSU by these same team members. No information identifying who a participant is (name, address, etc.) is included with either the web or paper survey responses. Instead, individual identification (ID) numbers are printed on the surveys or are used to access the web survey; these ID numbers are used to keep track of which households completed the survey. That way, we only continue to reach out to the households that have not completed the survey to make sure everyone has a chance to participate.
Once survey responses are at PSU, PSU secure the web survey data in password-protected electronic computer files. The paper surveys are kept in locked file cabinets. Only members of the PSU research team have access to these files. After they enter the paper survey answers into an electronic database and have checked to make sure everything was entered correctly, they shred the paper surveys. The electronic files of the survey data must be kept by PSU for at least three years after the survey project is completed before they are destroyed.
Some community members help us collect participant responses by connecting with people at events, in the parks, or at other public places to make sure we hear from as many groups as possible. These community members are trained in ways to best protect people’s privacy, consistently followed steps to ensure your privacy, and signed a confidentiality agreement stating their commitment to do so. These community partners would never ask for participants’ name, address, or other personal identity information.
What data are reported to the City by PSU?
PSU partners summarize the results of everyone’s responses to the survey in a report given to the City. Findings are only be reported in summary form. Findings presented for subgroups of respondents (for example, by age, zip code, racial or ethnic group, etc.) are only done when there is a large enough number of participants in any one subgroup so that individual privacy is protected.
PSU give the City a data file with individual survey responses that does NOT include personal identifying information. These data are used to create an online report on the City’s website. This online report only show data in summary form. The online report allows the public to view summary survey data to better understand the survey results.