BOARD02064

• Board Meeting Date: 3/21/2002
• Description: OWC Section - Drought and Water Supply Assessment
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

Section 4
i Project Approach (RFP Section 4.6)

.

CWCB, the Advisory Committee, and other survey participants will also provide some leverage
to the survey team in getting participation horn the target group of water users and providers.
As the survey, is deployed and response rates - and more importantly response gaps - become
known, CWCB and the Advisory CommitteE! will be able to determine where they maY need to
facilitate access and provide introductions to selected water users and providers for the survey
team.

Participation will also be promoted with endor~ement letters from DNR and the Governor, if
they can be arranged, as well as through describing the project at hand and the need for
participation. Introductory screeners will also emphasize the opportunity for participants to
learn more about the resources available to them (i.e., loans and other assistance from state
entities). An 800 number will be made available to the contact listi further enhancing the
response rate. In addition, we recommend that a pre-recorded message horn the Governor be
developed to encourage the participation of hardLto-reach contacts.

As a fall back, the survey team will reservE) more rigorous engagement techniques ~" such as
face-ta-face meetings - for those targeted water hsers and providei'Swhose participation in the
survey is' deemed imperative, of which there are certain to be a few. The survey team will
persist with additional phone calls, and if necessary, face-te-face meetings. Reach requires the
planning and implementation ofa multi-phased, multi-pronged approach.

Getting the Right Information .
To reiterate, the primary testing of the survey instrument, presented to the right set of sample
participants will allow the project team to identify shortcomings in the survey design and
delivery that limit the collection of the information needed to address project issues and meet
project objectives. Through the phased project, the shortcomings can be corrected and
appropriate survey questions and charmels "an be created and implemented:

It is possible that the survey instrument may require miilor modification (tweaking) during its
final deployment. The Bouvette Consulting T~am will utilize standard feedback procedures
and policies allowing our telephone canvasser~ and other staff on the survey "front-lines" to
provide the project management team with ihsight into poorly worded and/ or confusing
questions that are identified by water user or provider feedback. We will also use feedback
procedure,s from our staff of statisticians who will perform intermediate analyses of the data as
the data are collected, to identify questions that may be modified to improve the value of the
response. This type of continuous quality "onb;ol process is standard operating procedure for
each of our project teams.

Managing the Information i '
Our staff of telephone canvassers typically gath~rsthe information obtained through the survey
deployment. Each individual is prompted by !questions by a computer program resident on
individual computers. The same computer program is used by the telephone canvassers to
track the respondent answers, with data entry prompted with programmed screens. The data is
then warehoused in networked drives that can be accessed by the statisticians and incorporated .' ,
into a single project database. The project database manager is therefore responsible for
database design, telephone canvasser training, Gonsistency cif use, and maintaining the integrity

Section 4', Page 20