Frequently Asked Questions

All our surveys serve governments (municipal, provincial, and federal) as well as non-profits. By answering the survey questions, you are providing the information that these organizations need to make the best decisions they can with your tax dollars and contributions.

TellCityHall is a public sector program of Advanis, Inc., a Canadian Market Research company that has been in business for over 30 years. Advanis has been trusted by private sector companies and public sector organizations that are conducting research to understand more about consumers and the general public. Having received the Gold Seal designation from the MRIA since 2009, Advanis adheres to the market research industry’s Code of Conduct and Good Practice. In 2019 and going forward, Advanis is a member of CRIC (Canadian Research Insights Council) which adheres to the ESOMAR worldwide standards of research.

We chose the name "TellCityHall" for this service because we want it to be clear to people who do our surveys that we are asking about public policy topics. All of our surveys are for governments (municipal, provincial, federal) and non-profits.

We also chose this name because we wanted a website name that would be easy for people to remember and one that would be short enough to fit on a phone's call display.

Sometimes we do our own research; sometimes we do research for a specific municipality or province; and sometimes we do research for multiple organizations at the same time. That's why we don't have the name of a specific city or province in our brand name.

Some of our research is sponsored by/paid for by government clients or non-profit organizations. Other research is self-funded; that is, Advanis designs and pays for the study.

On the Surveys page of this site, we indicate which studies we paid for ourselves with an asterisk/a star. We may make the detailed results of these studies available to governments and not-for-profits; inquiries: results@tellcityhall.ca.

For full transparency, we specify who the study sponsor is when we recruit people to do the survey, on the login page of each survey, and on the last page of each survey.

None of your personal information (name, number, email address) will ever be associated with the answers you provide. And survey results will be reported at the group level, never at the individual level. If we ask open-ended questions, we will also review these responses to remove any personally-identifying information before we report the comments.

Absolutely. We are a member of canadianresearchinsightscouncil.ca and are approved by the Government of Canada, many provincial governments, and many financial institutions to collect and store data on behalf of them. We have passed security inspections by them all. And any research that we fund ourselves, like some of our TellCityHall studies, has the same data protections that we use for our clients' data.

Our Privacy Policy covers both of these issues (and more). Please see the headings "Data Collected on Our Site" and "Third-Party Disclosure" (and others, if they interest you).

No. The first three digits of your postal code do not identify you or your home (only your full mailing address would do that). Even if we asked your full postal code, it would not identify you personally, it would just show the area where you live, not your specific residence.

Of course, you can refuse to answer the question where we ask for the first three digits of your postal code.

And we ask for the first three digits of your postal code* to allow us to identify differences in opinions by geographical area (just like we identify differences by age and other characteristics).

* "Fun" fact: the first three digits are referred to as the "forward sortation area" or "FSA".

On some surveys, we ask certain questions -- like age -- as a continuous variable (your specific age) rather than in ranges so that we have flexibility to do different types of analysis. If we asked age ranges, we would be limited in the ways that we can analyze the results.

We don't allow individuals to decline to answer the age question because we need to ensure that our results are representative of the populations we're surveying, and age is one variable that we use to ensure this representativeness. We also need to screen out those who are under 14, because research ethics require that we do not survey younger people without parental permission.

No. This service is only available to government and non-profits.

No. We will only contact you to participate in surveys once every 6 weeks at the most.

In order to collect representative results, we use a technique called Random Digit Dialing. We randomly generate phone numbers.

To be more precise, phone numbers are classified into rate centres based on the first six digits of the phone number. There are up to 10,000 phone numbers in each rate centre. To generate a random number, we pick a rate centre and then randomly generate the last 4 digits.

Yes. The Government of Canada's CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) allows market research, polls, and surveys. The following is from their website "You may continue to receive calls from organizations conducting market research, polls or surveys even though you are registered on the National Do Not Call List (DNCL). These calls are exempt from the national DNCL....They’re not considered to be telemarketing calls because they are not selling a product or service, or requesting donations." (https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/phone/telemarketing/exempt.htm)

We do, however, keep our own do not call list for our research. If you would like us to remove you from our list, just send an email to info@tellcityhall.ca with the subject "Opt Out". In the email, please provide your phone number so that we can identify you in our database. Alternatively, you can leave a voicemail message that you would like to opt out by calling our toll-free number 1-888-883-7094.

Just send an email to info@tellcityhall.ca with the subject "Opt Out". In the email, please provide your phone number so that we can identify you in our database. Alternatively, you can leave a voicemail message that you would like to opt out by calling our toll-free number 1-888-883-7094.

In order to collect representative results, we randomly call Canadians. We do not allow people to "join" our lists, as that would not be random, so we could not be confident in our results.

However, there is significant interest from people wanting to do our surveys, so, at some point in the future, we may add a way for people to provide their number for us to call. We won't use these numbers for our randomly-generated results, but we will have some topics that don't require this level of precision, and we will be able to include you in these surveys. Please check our site in the future!

The text message (SMS) is automatically sent to you after you agree to do a survey. Sometimes the telecom company may temporarily block these messages. We will automatically send another message after 2 days and, in some cases, we will automatically send a final reminder after a week. (Of course, we will not send reminders after you have completed the survey.)

If there is a deadline to complete our survey, we will indicate it on the first page of the survey. If there is no deadline on that page, then the survey runs continuously.

If you work for a government department or agency or for a not-for-profit and are interested in results, please email results@advanis.net.

There are some studies for which we have published selected results. For these, please see the Surveys page of this site and look for the links to "Results" behind some study names.

Please send an email to info@tellcityhall.ca or leave a voicemail message at 1-888-883-7094.