WEST SPRINGFIELD — West Springfield has partnered with the company FlashVote to give residents an easy way to provide input on different matters to the town.
“We are always looking for ways to engage the community to ensure that local decisions reflect residents’ needs, build trust and encourage active participation,” said Carly Camossi, chief of operations for the town of West Springfield. “Community input leads to better policies, increased transparency and stronger community support for initiatives, fostering a sense of shared responsibility and improving quality of life.”
The town plans to send out monthly online surveys that would take residents only a few minutes to answer. The questions will focus on providing feedback and information on how the town can be improved. Although demographic and personal information is collected by FlashVote, that information is not shared with the town or others and all responses are anonymous.
Residents can sign up now at www.flashvote.com/westspringfieldma and choose whether to receive the surveys via email, text or phone call. After notification, residents will have 48 hours to respond to each survey. When the survey closes, those who responded will get a summary of the overall results.
“Scientific surveys are used to get input from regular people who are not especially interested in a topic. So the only way to get representative community input that you can generalize to your whole community is to use a scientific survey method,” explained Camossi. “Once we have a substantial number of participants we are going to start with a quality of life survey that we are going to create for West Springfield specifically.”
Camossi said that the town is getting registrations for FlashVote every day and feels that the interest will grow more once the first survey goes out in the coming weeks. The town is not expecting issues with people filling out multiple surveys because of the requirements to sign up.
“Generally, we have a community full of residents willing to participate fairly and appropriately,” noted Camossi. “Residents will have to create an account to participate in surveys.”
Town officials said that they are excited to hear from residents who may not typically interact with the town and to get feedback on a wider range of topics than they generally receive.
