Introduction
Nevada County’s leadership regularly uses Zencity as a performance management tool, continuously measuring resident satisfaction levels to identify and track community trends and sentiment. As the County navigates major strategic challenges, like Covid vaccine rollouts, performance management based on community feedback data has been a key part of the County’s success.
The Challenge
At the start of 2021, Nevada County, CA, like many counties around the nation, launched its Covid-19 vaccine operations. With limited doses for eligible community members and no clear guidelines yet set by the California Department of Public Health, the County had to determine how to prioritize vaccines and resident eligibility. The County decided – uniquely and with no state mandate to back it up – that it would vaccinate educators first, followed by healthcare workers, the elderly, and vulnerable populations. The County wanted to understand how community members felt about its strategic prioritization. Were they aligned? Was the County’s approach to vaccinations on the right track?
The Zencity Solution
County management turned to Zencity to answer these questions and determine the best plan of action moving forward by monitoring resident discourse and analyzing sentiment in the County’s Covid-19 Vaccine Project dashboard.
Impact
The Nevada County government’s Zencity dashboard showed that the public’s reaction to the County’s vaccine strategy and prioritization was favorable; from December through April, positive sentiment from resident’s online discourse towards the County’s vaccine messaging measured more than 4x higher than negative sentiment. Shortly after, the State followed with a mandate to allocate a certain number of vaccines to educators which was not only exciting, but further validated the national push for prioritizing vaccines for educators.
Zencity’s insights drilled down into the data to further validate the County’s approach – showing that the main driver of positive sentiment was specifically the County’s strategic prioritization – not just positive sentiment about vaccines generally.
Ultimately, by using Zencity as a performance management tool and monitoring community feedback, County leadership was able to determine that its vaccination strategy was unwaveringly well received. With the data to back this up, County leaders then confidently approached elected officials and stakeholders to get them on board with its prioritizations of limited vaccines.
As Nevada County continues to make strategic decisions in vaccinations, in local economic recovery, and more, local leadership will continue using Zencity as an important performance management tool and will continue tracking resident satisfaction and sentiment metrics, and adapt accordingly.
