Guildford Borough Council has recently recommissioned Enventure Research to undertake a programme of participation monitoring and doorstepping, further to a number of successful campaigns conducted in previous years.
Monitoring will take place across ten collection rounds pre-selected by the Council to establish a borough-wide participation rate for dry recycling, refuse and food waste. Trained participation monitors will work alongside the collection crews, recording the households which have put out their recycling bins and caddies for collection on three consecutive collections.
The monitoring team will also establish levels of contamination, as well as monitoring side waste and excess recycling presented for collection. The monitoring exercise will help to establish capture rates for all materials, using waste compositional analysis provided by the Council.
The findings from the participation monitoring, which will take place during June and July 2017, will inform the subsequent doorstepping campaign. Enventure Research’s trained recycling promoters will approach 15,000 households, engaging with at least 4,950 residents (33%) to establish usage of kerbside refuse and recycling services, answer residents’ questions about the services and explore future service options. The team will use handheld tablet computers to administer a conversational style survey with residents and record their responses.
In addition to the face-to-face engagement, the survey will be hosted online to allow all residents within the target areas the opportunity to participate. Calling cards will be left by the engagement team at properties where it has not been possible to make contact, explaining how residents can access the survey and providing them with some basic information which they would otherwise have missed out on.
Reports will be provided to Guildford Borough Council upon completion of each phase of the research, detailing how the project has been carried out and the survey findings, as well as outlining clear conclusions and recommendations for future engagement activities.