Special Rate Variation Community Engagement Report - Shoalhaven City Council

Community Feedback
Postcards, Email, Voicemail and Letters
A strong response was received from the postcards which included representation in the
targeted groups, ie, youth, Aboriginal, staff and people who rent. A small but significant
number of emails and voice mails were also received. Table 5 provides a breakdown of the
methods and number of responses.
Table 5: Methods, groups and number of responses
Collection method numbers
% of
Groups Postcard Email
Voice
Totals population
Letter
mail
group
General
1.2%
835 39 7 2 883
community
Youth 96 96 0.6%
Aboriginal 13 13 0.3%
Staff 16 13 29 2.9%
Renters 14 14
Totals 974 52 7 2 1035 1.1%
Analysis method
Data obtained from the Phase 1 engagement processes were recorded into Council’s TRIM
records system then entered verbatim into an Excel spreadsheet under headings relating to
the three questions, ie ‘what is great about the Shoalhaven?’, ‘what would make it better?’,
and ‘what are the issues that will impact the Shoalhaven over the next 10 years?’ (staff
postcard and email only), together with information about the data origins.
To improve the analysis process, data was ‘cleaned’ by correcting spelling mistakes and
adding full stops between separate points.
“Leximancer” software was used to extract the key themes and concepts from the
spreadsheet response data. Council’s one month licence of the software provided time to
analyse the data as a group, focused on individual questions and for different respondent
groups. While a small number of distinctions were found, the small number of respondents in
the some of the groups meant that the output analysis was not considered statistically
significant and therefore is not included in this report.
Tables (Appendix F) indicating Concepts and sub-concepts were produced by Leximancer
and included supporting data from the postcards and other collection methods. Leximancer
maps (Appendix G) showing concepts and their linkages were also produced.
Social Media
There were a limited number of comments regarding the CSP Review received on Council’s
Facebook page. The low response on this forum did not produce data that was useful for
inclusion in the overall response analysis.
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