Last week, between the 15 and 20 of February, Bankstown City Council was seeking feedback on a range of Council services and activities via Facebook.

An important way in which Council measures our success is through community satisfaction of our services. Since 1995, Council has carried out regular city-wide resident surveys to gauge community perceptions of the performance of services which Council provide. The next full survey will occur later this year.

Council’s community survey is usually undertaken as a phone poll and the 18-44 age bracket is a group that Council finds difficult to reach as part of this process. As we want our community survey results to represent our whole community, Council must then resort to other means to capture additional feedback.

As this age group typically has a high uptake of social media, our recent survey was an opportunity to contribute to regular feedback we seek from our community on a range of topics and using a range of means. It was also an opportunity to see whether social media could be used to help us ensure that we obtain feedback from the whole cross section of our community during the next full Community Survey.

We had an overwhelming response. The following represents a summary of results obtained to 26 February 2016. These results provide important information for Council for their ongoing management of these services. These results can also be used to develop future operational plans, better direct Council resources (including communications and education), and provide baseline and comparison data for existing and future surveys. We want to again thank all those who participated and to those who indicated they would like to participate in future focus groups on Council’s activities and services. Your participation helps us to improve our services to you.