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The list of people to poll comes from the publicly available state-registered voters list for the state of Florida. It is not a complete list of registered voters, it is only those voters that added their phone numbers when they registered to vote(which is optional) in addition to white pages phone book listings for registered voters. In compliance with the TCPA, we will not call cellphones, and we have proccesses in place to filter them out. Also, if you don't want these survey calls, we will add your phone number to our no-calling list, just email us at info@stpetepolls.org and we will take you off the list. You can also call 727-865-4372 and select option 6 to not be called about our St Petersburg polls in the future(This will not work if you block your caller ID when you call us). The phone polling data that we collect is anonymous in our system, and we are not using any of this information to sell anything to the people we are calling. We intend to keep conducting the General St. Petersburg polls regularly, about once every 45 days, with roughly half of the questions being the same from month to month to allow trending of opinion on those topics. We intend to keep doing St-Petersburg-only polling of political, local and civic issues that are in the news. In addition to that, we also plan on doing some other Florida-based polling during election times, like we have during the 2012 election season. We are not affiliated with any political party, and we always strive to keep any appearance of a bias on an issue out of how we do our polling. As of the March 2012 St Petersburg General Survey, the statistics for the General St Petersburg surveys are scientifically weighted by political party, race, gender and age. This is done by taking the percentages(down to the tenth decimal point) of each of those demographics for the entire voting population of St. Petersburg, and using all four categories to weight the results that we get to adjust our sample to fit the actual demographics of the city. Because we use such a large sample size, the weighting has not changed the results that much, no more than 0.4% at most. For more information go to our statistical analysis page. We wanted to do these St Petersburg polls for several reasons: First, we have done polling surveys for several of our clients before, mostly in other states, so it was fairly easy for us to set up, and the costs are low for us. Second, we had a few meetings with Shadow Vote and they offered us some lists of registered voters in the city of St Petersburg, so we partnered with them on this project starting November 2011 before the city election, as a survey as well as an informational call to registered voters to remind them that there was a city election coming up soon. Third, no one was doing regular polls like this targeted only to St Petersburg, and we wanted to know how our fellow citizens felt about local government and key issues as they come up, like the Rays, the Pier, red light cameras and EMS services. It has been very interesting to see the results, and how there are some issues that people feel pretty strongly about. Fourth, this could potentially lead to doing more polls for other organizations, since phone polling is currently a very small part of our business. We have done healthcare surveys, product satisfaction surveys, surveys for schools and of course other political polls, but these St Petersburg polls are a good way for us to show how polling can work without having to show data from one of our clients. Also, since we plan on polling several times a year, we will be able to show trends and how public opinion changes over time. Our company, Fextel, Inc., is based in St. Petersburg. |
