E-Democracy is launching a small grant funded effort to build online engagement among workers and residents in downtown Saint Paul. It will be an interesting mix of civic, professional, and social networking. The key difference from typical local online groups will be a focus on the daytime crowd... primarily workers. (Greater downtown Saint Paul has roughly 75,000 workers, 8,000 residents and growing fast housing wise. My goal, build an online group with 10% of folks who work, live, or frequently visit downtown or 10,000 people in a Facebook Group.) While E-Democracy invested heavily in an online neighbors forum user survey which generated 1300 responses - http://blog.e-democracy.org/posts/2610 - it was at the *end* of a well funded project. (Although, by design with our volunteer base and cheap tech, the online communities live on supported by participant donations.) In this case, I see an opportunity for a short pre-engagement survey that can be used to both get some baseline data and inform the facilitation, content seeding, and guidelines for the online (Facebook) group. And if we secure funding beyond the three month pilot, we can do a post survey in a year. So what questions have you asked in a similar situations? Or about community engagement? Or professional networking online? Etc. Please send input along ASAP: clift@e-democracy.org In the next two days, I need to get our short survey into the field. We will be promoting it through many local channels to reach prospective group members and will include an invite to request an invite to the new group with their email at end of the survey. Thanks, Steven Clift E-Democracy.org P. S. Last time we took 18 months to research, deliberate on and craft our questions. This was our previous question set: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7hmVl0vhGLVTjhudFU0ZGU5RlU&authuser=0