Earlier this week, about 2,000 Portland-area residents found a link to a survey in their mailbox. Opt In, Metro's endeavor at changing the way it gets feedback from the public, was live.
Even though Opt In is one-fifth of the way to its goal of 10,000 participants, its organizers acknowledge it's got a long way to go.
A look at the demographics of participants in Opt In shows few surprises. Ninety-five percent of the participants are white. Seventy percent are Democrats, six percent Republican. Eighty-six percent have a college degree, and less than one percent say they never attended any college. Only 23 percent hail from Clackamas or Washington counties, which collectively have 56 percent of Metro's constituency.
"It's definitely not the broad-based representation we want to get," said Patty Unfred, a senior manager in Metro's communications department. "Clearly, Washington County and Clackamas County are two high priorities. Ethnic and political diversity is clearly not well represented."
Demographic data is published on Metro's website and updated frequently.
Why isn't the low turnout outside of Portland's core surprising? Historically, Metro's struggled to reach out to suburban communities. In more than three dozen Clackamas County precincts, at least 35 percent of voters failed to check a box in last year's Metro Council President race. That number approached 20 precincts in Washington County, and would have probably been higher if not for Tom Hughes' roots in Hillsboro.
Metro's communications staff has said all along that the goal of Opt In is to be transparent in its deficiencies – if a particular survey has a dramatically low participation rate among any given constituency, that information will be available with a comment report.
But with less than 100 blacks and Hispanics signed up for the panel, underrepresentation is one thing – near complete absence is another story together.
Much of the initial marketing of the project was aimed at Metro stakeholders and the core of Portland. Metro bought newspaper advertisements in 22 newspapers; 12 are primarily distributed in Multnomah County. Online ads appeared on websites for TV stations, the Portland Tribune, Willamette Week and OregonLive.com.
Now, Unfred said, is the time for targeted marketing.
"We haven't started doing our targeted outreach on Opt In to diverse communities yet," she said. "If you look at any broad-based outreach, you know you're not going to be successful unless you're able to make that personal contact with those groups that typically don't interface with us."
A success story in that was with the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland. That group, Unfred said, was particularly vigilant about getting its membership to sign up for the panel.
"The best thing that could happen is people see this as an opportunity to have their communities respresented," she said.
Another missing demographic is youth. Only two high schoolers signed up for Opt In in its first month. Less than 2 percent of the participants so far are under the age of 25.
Working on mobile technologies to reach out to youth and developing resources to translate Opt In questionnaires into other languages are long-term goals of the project, Unfred said.
Correction - An earlier version of this story misidentified the percentage of participants by county. It has been corrected to reflect that only 23 percent of participants are from Clackamas or Washington counties.