Most of what NCV hears comes through channels that require someone to come to us — an online form, a survey link, a meeting. That quietly filters out a lot of people. Shift workers, renters, people without reliable internet, people who are simply too busy or too sceptical to seek out a community group. Their concerns are no less real; they are just less likely to be recorded.
A Snap Survey is how we go to them instead.
What a Snap Survey is
A Snap Survey is deliberately tiny: four questions on a single sheet of paper. It is designed to be answered in about a minute, standing up, by someone who did not plan on being surveyed that day — at a train station, a shopping centre, a community barbecue, a market, a sports club, outside a school.
Four questions is not a limitation we are apologising for. It is the point. A long survey gets abandoned or, worse, only gets completed by the small group of people who were already going to tell us what they think.
Why we run them
What happens to your answers
Every response is entered into the same system as everything else we hear. That matters: a concern raised on a paper form at a bus stop ends up in exactly the same place as one submitted online, and carries exactly the same weight.
- Each of the four questions is linked to a topic, so responses can be counted alongside issues raised through every other channel.
- Responses appear in What's Been Raised together with everything else the community has told us, marked so we know they came from a Snap Survey.
- They feed into the findings we publish in What We've Heard, and into what NCV puts to government.
We record what you tell us, not who you are. Snap Surveys do not ask for your name, and you are never signed up to anything by answering one. What we do with information generally is set out in How We Handle Your Data.
Where this fits
Snap Surveys are one of several ways NCV listens, alongside the annual Community Survey, Kitchen Table Conversations, and anyone at all choosing to Share an Issue. No single method reaches everyone, which is precisely why we do not rely on one. You can read more about that approach in How We Listen.