find out where life in your city actually stands – and what to change first
You set priorities for this place every year. The Compass tells you what your residents would put first, and where the distance between the two is biggest.
what it is and what you get
The Compass asks your residents how life here actually is for them. They mark two points on each of the seventeen living goals: where a good life would be, and where they are now. The distance between them is the read.
What comes back is a canvas. A written read of where your residents stand and where to begin, across the city and area by area, drawn from what they actually said.
It’s an online questionnaire, about ten minutes each, anonymously, over a four-week window.
Example – partly – read
Click image to enlarge
Try it on yourself first. It’s the same one your residents would use.
why it matters
A city can be thriving on paper and quietly wearing people down – or holding people who’d struggle to say why they stay.
Your city already measures a great deal: air quality, transport, housing, safety, green space.
Then look at what actually moves how good life feels here. Mental health. Close relationships. Whether people have time. Whether anyone feels they belong. The Compass reads both halves: the data, and the lived experience behind it.
Cities measure what they can build. People live on what they can’t.
when you’d reach for it
The figures look good.
On paper the city’s doing well. Ask the people and it’s another story. The Compass shows you where the gap is.
You’ve already consulted.
The meetings, the surveys, the have-your-say portal. Those tell you what people object to. This tells you what they want, and how far off it is.
The city is changing fast.
Nomads, tourism, money moving in. The Compass tells you what long-time residents now value, and where they’re feeling the squeeze.
Before the masterplan.
A regeneration, a new district, a big spend. Read what people here want good to look like, before you build it.
People are leaving.
The ones who go rarely say why. See the friction while there’s still time to act on it.
Different neighbourhoods, different lives.
The Compass shows it area by area, so you can see which parts are thriving and which are under pressure.
why this is different
It reads a life in the city, not a city.
The city is one part of how someone’s doing. Ask only about the city and the city is the only problem you’ll ever find. The Compass asks about the whole picture, so you can see whether the city is what needs fixing.
It starts with the ideal, not the complaint.
Most surveys ask residents to rate what they’ve got, or to file a complaint. The Compass asks what a good life here would look like first, then where things stand today. Two marks on each of the seventeen living goals. The gap between them shows where the city is closest to its best and where it’s furthest, and that’s your first direction. Read it again a year later and the change in that gap tells you whether the moves worked.
You get something written.
Not a template with your numbers dropped in. A canvas written for your city, saying where your residents stand and what to look at first.
Residents get something back.
Everyone who takes part gets their own canvas – personal, theirs to keep. A read on their own answers, written for them. That’s also why the answers come back honest: people reflect differently when the reflection is their own.
anonymous by design
Most consultation reaches the people who always show up – the meeting-goers, the letter-writers. This reaches the quiet majority too.
No one sees what a single resident answered. Not you. Not me. Answers go straight into the totals.
Results are only shown once enough people in an area have answered, so no single resident can be picked out.
Honest answers are the only ones worth paying for. This is how you get them.
what it costs
One number, set by one question: how big is the read?
Slide to the number of residents you’d cover.
The canvas
Where your residents stand.
written fresh for you
One city read. And a personal canvas for every resident who takes part.
Want it read with you.
The canvas tells you where the city stands. What it means, and what to move first, is a conversation. I work through it properly beforehand, then we sit down and set a direction. Two days, €2,000 a day. Larger cities usually want more time and more people round the table – we’ll size that when we talk.
Read it twice.
One read tells you where your residents stand and what to move first. Two reads, a year apart, show whether the moves landed. Same seventeen goals, same question, so you can put the change in front of a council and defend it. Booked together, the pair costs a quarter less than two separate reads.
how it works, start to finish
- We agree the reach: a neighbourhood, a district, or the whole city.
- You get a join code.
- You share the code with your residents, through your own channels.
- Each person spends about ten minutes on the Compass, anonymously.
- You receive the city’s canvas – the anonymous, city-level read.
- If you want it read with you, we go through it together and set a direction.
Start to finish, about six weeks from the day the code goes out. Four weeks the Compass is open, and two weeks while I work through the answers.
after the reading
You’ll have a reading and a direction. Acting on it is a different kind of work – developing solutions, business cases, pilots and projects that take it into daily reality. That’s QOL creations.
I’ve been writing about this for years.
The pieces that look at a place: your city.