Listening

A volunteer board can’t hold a meeting every week. The gap is bridged by ongoing listening structures that surface what downtown is saying without requiring people to show up in person.

What we listen on

Surveys

We publish targeted surveys at faydta.com/safety-survey and similar paths. Each survey:

• Takes 3 minutes or less
• Is anonymous by default (optional contact info at the end)
• Maps to a specific upcoming decision or meeting
• Reports results back within a clear window — the June 9 Downtown Watch survey said results would be shared by June 15, and meant it

Surveys are tracked in our admin portal so we can see response rates, sentiment, and demographic distribution. Aggregate findings are shared publicly; individual responses are never published.

Issue reports

The issues page accepts any downtown report — broken streetlights, safety concerns, parking, trash, infrastructure, general questions. Reports can be:

• Submitted anonymously (no account required)
• Filed by signed-in members (richer attribution)
• Filed via the /issue slash command on Discord (members who’ve linked their account)

Every issue cross-posts to the matching corridor channel on Discord (#downtown or #bragg-blvd or #general-business-discussions) with a 👀 reaction so other members can pile-on to signal they’re seeing the same thing. Reaction counts feed back into our prioritization.

District-specific Discord channels

We maintain corridor-specific channels:

• #downtown — Hay / Person / Franklin / Maxwell / Market House area
• #bragg-blvd — Bragg Boulevard corridor

These are ongoing, low-friction listening venues. Members post observations between meetings (“saw broken streetlight at corner of X again, third time this month”); the board reads them in real time and aggregates them for the next district meeting.

Structured social-media listening campaigns

For high-stakes meetings (the June 9 Downtown Watch with FCPD, for example), we run a 5-day listening campaign on Facebook before the meeting. The campaign is intentionally engineered for comments, not likes:

• Day 1: “Drop your block in the comments + one word for how it feels”
• Day 2: Real anonymized quote from a downtown owner → “do you hear this too?”
• Day 3: Forced-choice emoji vote → ranked priorities
• Day 4: Live photo + “see you tomorrow at 6 PM”
• Day 5: Recap with three things downtown said, plus three things police committed to

Every comment is logged with block, category, and direct quote (anonymized). The aggregated packet goes into the meeting with the actual Calls-for-Service data from police — two sources of truth side-by-side.

The full strategy and post-by-post templates are documented in our planning files.

What we don’t do with listening data

• We don’t sell, share, or syndicate individual responses
• We don’t connect issue reports to specific businesses publicly (private records only)
• We don’t publish location-tagged complaint data — that puts businesses at risk
• We don’t store IP addresses for survey responses
• We don’t use the listening data for any purpose other than what the prompt says (“for the June 9 meeting,” “for the parking initiative,” etc.)

For other boards

If you’re a small board figuring out how to listen between meetings:

• Pick one corridor / topic for ongoing listening, not all of them. The June 9 Downtown Watch campaign worked because it had a narrow window and a specific room to fill. Generic “tell us your concerns” channels die from lack of focus.
• Engagement (comments, votes, posts) beats reach (likes, shares). Likes are vanity. Comments are data. Design every post around extracting a specific signal.
• Anonymize and aggregate before publishing. People share more when they trust they won’t be quoted by name. The aggregate is what matters in the room.
• Bring the listening to the room. Print the comment summary and the survey results. Lay them next to the official data. The presence of the printout is what makes it real.

What this looks like in practice

For the June 9 Downtown Watch:

• Survey at faydta.com/safety-survey — 3 minutes
• Issue reports rolling in via the website and /issue slash command
• Facebook listening campaign — 5 posts over 5 days
• Three Discord channels capturing observations
• Members and visitors at the meeting itself

Five overlapping listening surfaces. Anyone who wanted to be heard had multiple ways to do it. The combined packet brought into the meeting room represented far more downtown voices than the 30 chairs at Holmes Security.