City ringing up locals for new survey on services

By Lethbridge Herald on July 22, 2025.

Alejandra Pulido-Guzman
Lethbridge Herald

The City of Lethbridge has launched a community satisfaction survey to gather feedback from residents and guide ongoing efforts to improve programs and services.  

Tara Grindle, communications and engagement manager, told reporters Monday that the survey will only take approximately 10 minutes to complete over the phone and those who wish to participate voluntarily can do so online. 

“This is an opportunity for residents to give feedback to the city to let us know how we are doing. There will be two parts to it this year,” said Grindle. 

In the past, the City has conducted a comprehensive, 20-minute, statistically valid survey every four years, which played a key role in informing council during operating budget deliberations. But given the rapid pace of changes today, the City decided to do it more frequently. 

“Our last survey was in 2022 and it was related to our operating budget at the time,” said Grindle. 

The 20-minute survey will be recommended as part of the engagement plan for the 2028-2031 operating budget. If approved by council at that time, the survey would be executed in 2027.   

“This year the survey is a little bit shorter… only 10 minutes, and we will do a phone survey which is statistically valid, to make sure we have a good cross-section of the community, and everyone is represented in that,” said Grindle. 

She added that the second part is an online option for residents who are not contacted by phone. 

Those contacted to take the survey can expect to answer questions about the services the city provides, and how satisfied they are with them. 

“This feeds into some of our key performance indicators (KPI) in the city of how we are doing, and by being able to measure that we can continuously improve,” said Grindle. 

Multiple departments have set goals and have realized that satisfaction surveys are a way to get information from residents, she added. 

“We want to make sure we are doing that on a frequent basis so those departments can be checking that measurement and see if they are meeting their goals.”

The survey contains some specific questions regarding 311 and customer service in general, as well as general questions about different departments such as parks, for example. 

“Communication is another one,” said Grindle. “We want to know how people get their information from the City and how they want to get that information, so we can make sure that everyone is informed about what’s happening.”

Forum Research Inc. will conduct the phone survey on behalf of the City of Lethbridge and the online survey link can be found at http://www.getinvolvedlethbridge.ca 

Grindle said the online survey will remain open until Aug. 15 with results available sometimes in the fall.