Frequently Asked Questions

Your address was sampled at random from a list of all addresses from the post office. This is a standard service offered by the post office. It is not a city government file and no household member is named in the file.

Polco uses your ZIP code - and, after continued use, your name - to verify your residency against publicly available voter information in your state. With verified respondents, we can reduce the risk of one person answering many times. By entering your email address, you can create an account and find out when we post a new question on Polco.

Polco is a private company that helps residents give input to their local governments to better inform policy decisions. Using Polco saves the local government money by replacing older, more expensive methods of getting input. It saves staff from having to build and maintain online engagement tools or manage multiple input channels. The app and the website let a broader range of people give public input, and they protect respondents’ privacy. Your personal information is never shared with anyone, not even your local government.

The resident of the property should complete the survey.

We have randomly selected households within our jurisdiction to receive the survey. We would also like to choose in an unbiased way a person within each household to complete the survey. This way we ensure the results are representative of our community as a whole. While it may seem a bit strange, using the “birthday method” is a simple way to select an adult from within each household without permitting bias in our results.

We would prefer that you complete the survey. The “birthday method” described in the letter creates the most representative sample of our jurisdiction. You’ll be surprised at how much you can contribute.

Yes, the government is here to serve all residents, and it is important to us that we get feedback from a complete cross-section of our residents.

No, please don’t fill it out again. Because responses are anonymous, we don’t know who already completed a survey. Since we only want one response from each person, those who already sent in a survey should not return another one. The second copy is distributed as a reminder to all people selected to be sent a survey. Thank you for completing the first survey.

The sample was designed to be as representative as possible of the population of our city, so by sending copies of the survey to people who request a copy, we would skew the sample and make the results less meaningful.Please wait for the open participation period that will start around July 14 – 28, 2025.

Results of the survey will be shared with the Town of Frederick leadership team and Board of Trustees. Results will guide our work to support the Towns Strategic Plan. Resident opinions are encouraged and supported to address essential community needs and issues.

We want to compare the demographic profile of those responding to the demographic profile of the municipality as presented by the Census. In order to be able to do this we asked our race and ethnicity question the same way the Census does. The census designates Hispanic as an ethnicity, not a race.