Community Insights

Residents are randomly selected from Council’s database and invited to take part in the survey by mail or email. Residents may also receive an SMS notification about the survey.

Each invitation is a unique link to ensure the survey can only be completed once.

Some residents can also participate by clicking through from an online ad.

Respondents must be 15 years or older and a current resident of the City of Whittlesea to take part.

If you are selected from Council’s database to take part in the study, you will receive a letter or an email with detailed instructions on how to complete the survey. You will be requested to click a link in the email or scan a QR code and enter your unique number to access the digital survey.

If you have seen an ad for the survey, you can simply click through to complete the survey. 

The survey will take you approximately 12 minutes to complete. You will have approximately 3-4 weeks to respond to the survey. 

Each survey has a different set of questions to help us learn about your experiences living in the City of Whittlesea. We are not looking for specific feedback about how things are changing over time for our community. 

Depending on the survey you receive, you may be asked about local activities and daily life in the City of Whittlesea, neighbourhood safety, connections, support and involvement within the community, quality of life, sense of belonging, disaster preparedness and knowledge of healthy lifestyle behaviours. 

The information you provide will be combined with responses from other members of the community to produce statistical data for the City of Whittlesea. 

No, participation is voluntary. You can stop at any time without explanation or penalty. You are free to withdraw your responses from the study until data analysis has started. During the data analysis stage, all responses will be de-identified and we will no longer be able to identify the responses provided by you. 

Your insights help make the community a better place to live, work and play. It is only through individual contributions that we can track how the community is changing over time. This helps us to know what to focus on now and in the future so that we can remain responsive to the needs of our residents. 

We recommend you complete the survey using a computer or a tablet. While you can do the survey on a mobile phone, the questions layout may be a little more difficult to navigate.  

No, you don’t need to do the survey all in one go. As you go through the survey, your responses are automatically saved. This means you can come back and complete the survey later from where you left off.

The survey can be completed in the following languages: Arabic, Chinese  - Simplified, Chinese  - Traditional, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Persian, Punjabi, Sinhala, Vietnamese and Turkish. At the beginning of the survey, select your preferred language. To use the free interpreter service, call 131 450.

A summary of our findings will be available on our website for the community to view. The results will also be published in strategic reports that Council is required to deliver to keep information transparent and accountable to the community and other government levels.  

The information you share will be combined with other respondents to produce statistical data for the municipality. During the data collection and reporting period (approximately 4 months), survey responses are stored on a secure server hosted by Australian Survey Research (ASR). Following this, the survey data is cleaned and deidentified prior to being moved to a database on the City of Whittlesea’s cloud server. 

You may access the information you provide by contacting Council on 9217 2170 until it has been deidentified during the data analysis stage. At this time we will no longer be able to identify the responses provided by you.

Your information is provided in accordance with the principles in the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 and our Privacy and Data Protection Policy. Information that identifies individual people or households is never published and your personal information will not be disclosed to any other organisation.   

For more information about the Community Insights Study or for assistance in completing the survey, please contact Customer Service on 9217 2170 and ask to speak to a member of the Research and Analytics Unit. If you have a complaint, you may call the same number. All complaints will be treated confidentially.