CURP Survey

In 2003, Northeastern University's Center For Urban and Regional Policy designed a self-assesment questionnaire and accompanying analysis for 12 cities in Massachusetts. They worked in collaboration with the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP), the NAIOP foundation, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. The purpose of the project was to provide feedback to the cities regarding 36 broad themes relevant to economic growth and development, and how that city compared to its peers. CURP used commercial survey software to run the project, but found there were too many limitations in the software, and came to the EdTech Center in 2006 to help solve the problem. The EdTech Center used existing homegrown survey software as the foundation of the new self-assessment questionnaire and reporting tool, as well as existing account creation and authentication code for the cities to log in to their own editable version of the survey. An additional feature was the ability for cities to compare their results against other cities using different pre-determined query criteria, such as population size, or total annual budget. As a result, the pilot program run in October 2006 was completely automated, as opposed to the previous years when a CURP administrator had to do much of the analysis and reporting manually.

Project Collaborator(s): David Soule, CURP