"BUILDING THE BEST CITY POSSIBLE AS DEFINED BY TULSANS": THE GALLUP-TULSA CITIVOICE INDEX SYNOPSIS On becoming the new mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the end of 2016, G. T. Bynum, a moderate Republican, saw a chance to make city government more responsive to residents and help them flourish. Elections did not supply much real information about residents' preferences, however, and between elections, how could a public official learn what people wanted when only small numbers of the most motivated turned up at community meetings? Bynum asked. Bynum wanted to learn more about Tulsans' priorities as well as their senses of trust in government, safety, access to help, and well-being. He tapped James Wagner-head of a small, new city office on data, performance, and strategy-to work with Gallup, Inc., on a survey later named the Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice Index. Administered twice-once in 2018 and once at the beginning of 2020-the survey generated data that Bynum used for driving a variety of city initiatives. The most surprising finding was that within income groups, a sense of neighborhood belonging appeared to influence perceptions of well-being more strongly than did many other plausible drivers, and Bynum launched a new and experimental effort to improve neighborhood experience. Jennifer Widner drafted this case study based on interviews conducted during June and July 2024. Case published in August 2024. INTRODUCTION As the end of December 2016 approached, G. T. Bynum, Tulsa, Oklahoma, mayor-elect, was at work with his leadership team to begin acting on his campaign pledges. The 39-year-old Bynum, a former council member, had won a landslide victory against the incumbent, a fellow Republican, on a commitment to help heal the city's divisions and enable residents to flourish and thrive. Located in eastern Oklahoma on the edge of the Great Plains and in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, Tulsa was a midsize American city with a population of roughly 410,000 within a metropolitan area with a population of about 1,034,000. The city proper sat at the intersection of the Muscogee (Creek), Osage, and Cherokee Nations, which the US federal government had forcibly moved to the banks of the Arkansas River under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Indian nations held jurisdiction over their own members, about 18,500 of whom lived within the city boundaries and about 30,000 in Greater Tulsa.1 Through the years, oil and agriculture had attracted a larger, more diverse population: 53% white, 15% Black, 17% Hispanic, 4.5% Native American, and 3% Asian in advance of the 2020 census. The city formed a key part of the Bible Belt, home of a variety of Christian evangelical traditions and Southern Baptists, although it also comprised smaller numbers of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, and Buddhist residents, some of them descended from families that had arrived in Tulsa decades earlier. Although Oklahoma was a reliably red, Republican state, about a third of Tulsa's voters had cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate in the 2016 presidential election.2 Bynum, a moderate conservative, was the candidate of choice for many residents turned off by the extreme rhetoric that had infected political life across the United States. Bynum had campaigned on boosting incomes, improving education, reducing crime, and attracting new residents to the city. And he promised evidence-based decision-making. "My opponent ran the classic partisan playbook," he said in a TED talk about his aims for the city. "We had a novel idea. What if, instead of responding with partisanship, we responded with a focus on results? What if we ran a campaign that was not about running against someone, but was about bringing people together behind a common vision? And so, we decided to respond not with a negative ad, but with something people find even sexier-data points."3 Voters had voiced their approval at the ballot box, and Bynum defeated his closest opponent by 17 points. Once in office, Bynum told his team he not only wanted to know whether a service had performed well or poorly. He also wanted to know which problems residents wanted the city government to address most urgently. And above, all he also wanted to know whether residents thought they could thrive in Tulsa. Bynum reached out to James Wagner, a public servant and city planner then with the regional transportation planning agency. While serving on Tulsa's city council, Bynum had seen Wagner explain complicated policy issues by using data. He asked Wagner to join the city staff and head a new office of performance, strategy, and innovation. There he wanted Wagner to pursue the challenge of assessing residents' priorities and how well Tulsans felt they were doing in their lives-an initiative that soon took on a life of its own. THE CHALLENGE Wagner did not have to think long about the offer. Bynum's enthusiasm was contagious, and his emphasis on outcomes, as opposed to outputs-like numbers of police officers trained-caught Wagner's attention. Bynum floated the idea of using a survey to better understand whether residents felt their lives were improving and what kinds of experiences or circumstances shaped their sense of well-being. He had heard about aspirations and preferences at neighborhood meetings, but the majority of Tulsans did not participate in such events. Bynum needed a clearer picture-one based on a more representative set of voices. When the mayoral handover took place in December 2016, Wagner began to move forward with several data initiatives, drawing assistance from teams of volunteers (text box 1). But a survey would be a heavy lift and require more attention than his office or volunteer labor could provide. In addition to requiring specialized expertise, an opinion survey would present a number of analytical challenges, and the results could be difficult to explain to members of the public. Text Box 1: Data-Driven City Government, Tulsa Style Before James Wagner joined the mayor’s team, the city performance office had only a limited area of responsibility: it conducted a regular survey to track citizen satisfaction with core services, and it introduced city employees to Six Sigma, a program that many big businesses used for reducing error and boosting performance and efficiency. But Mayor G. T. Bynum was interested in getting at root causes of problems citizens identified and in enabling the city to experiment with a range of possible solutions so the city could direct its limited resources to solutions that worked. Wagner began by investigating what his counterparts in similar cities were doing—such as Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky. For instance, Louisville’s Office of Performance Improvement and Innovation, which launched in 2012, had organized hackathons to encourage better use of city data, had achieved a 29% reduction in repair time in its parks system, and had expanded broadband access for low-income residents. Those things caught Bynum’s attention. As soon as Bynum took office, Wagner began to build on some of those Louisville ideas. One of his first steps was to expand capacity by inviting interested volunteers from businesses, local universities, and nonprofits as well as government departments to help the city use its data to identify problems residents or city departments faced and develop solutions. Wagner anticipated that an initial meeting would draw about a dozen people. Instead, though, more than 60 showed up. The group split into teams, each equipped with a range of expertise, and then Wagner provided data the teams requested, appointed one member of each as project manager, and turned them loose. The teams reported back 10 weeks later with a range of helpful insights and proposals and were eager to do more. The program initiated a series of 10-week sprints that drew additional citizen engagement. The success of that initiative, later named Urban Data Pioneers, derived in part from the mayor and his contagious enthusiasm. “People were inspired by him,” Wagner said. But the meetings also gave civically minded residents a welcome opportunity to use their talents to benefit the community. Among their many contributions, Urban Data Pioneers teams analyzed the roughly 7,000 property-code violations reported during a one-year period and found that about two-thirds were properties with nonresident owners or landlords, who would not receive an alert sent to the building locations. In response, the city shifted to a text message system, and compliance rose 15%. Wagner’s office also developed several other ways to improve residents’ lives and interactions with the city. For example, at the time he was elected, Bynum was a fellow at Results for America—a nonprofit organization that helps local leaders learn from evidence—and Wagner assumed the balance of his term, which focused on using data to gain behavioral insights. The Results for America behavioral insights team visited Tulsa and helped the city test and implement a text message system that enabled the municipal court to remind people about payments they owed, so they didn’t lapse and risk arrest. Later, during the pandemic, Wagner’s office used utility billing data—a red flag for eviction risk—and linked households that were behind on their payments with legal aid to assist them. See “Bloomberg Philanthropies announces Louisville as an American city best at using data to improve residents’ lives in 2019,” April 24, 2029, https://louisvilleky.gov/news/bloomberg-philanthropies-announces-louisville-american-city-best-using-data-improve-residents; “Urban Data Pioneers,” Engaged Cities Award Case Study, Cities of Service, Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation, Johns Hopkins University, no date, https://citiesofservice.jhu.edu/resource/urban-data-pioneers-tulsa/; “In Tulsa, volunteers mine data to help city government make better decisions,” Bloomberg Cities, Medium, November 9, 2018, https://bloombergcities.medium.com/in-tulsa-volunteers-mine-data-to-help-city-government-make-better-decisions-61f60981fe46; Sarah Holder, “The Data Brigade of Tulsa, Oklahoma,” CityLab, Bloomberg, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-02/the-secret-weapon-of-tulsa-s-republican-mayor; and “How Baltimore and Tulsa Are Using Data to Foster Community,” Route Fifty, November 10, 2018, https://www.route-fifty.com/digital-government/2018/11/baltimore-tulsa-data-community/152742/. The mayor's aims were understandable, however. The divisions that he sought to heal had a long history. Built on cattle, agriculture, and oil, Tulsa was in the middle of a campaign to diversify its economy. Once known as the Oil Capital of the World, it suffered during the 1980s, when a recession led to an oil glut, and many natural resources companies left the area.4 Business and government worked together to establish other industries, and the area briefly recovered before another recession in the early 2000s led to significant job loss. Since that time, aerospace, finance, technology, and service industries had moved in, alongside some oil and mining company headquarters.5 Median income was $56,648, only slightly less than national levels.6 Not everyone had shared equally in the good times or the bad. About 18% of residents fell below the national poverty line, and many were Black, Hispanic, or Native American.7 Among those who settled in the area after the discovery of oil in 1901 was Ottawa W. Gurley, a Black US Post Office worker who purchased land and built the Greenwood neighborhood, which soon became known as Black Wall Street, home to over 10,000 people. In 1921, a white mob wiped out the neighborhood overnight in a massacre that killed more than 300 residents and burned shops, offices, and houses.8 When Bynum became mayor, the lifespans of people living in the neighborhoods the mob had attacked were on average 11 years shorter than those of other Tulsans. A court case brought by the last living residents who had survived the attacks and sought reparations was beginning to take off at the time Bynum was elected mayor. (The case failed on technical grounds in 2024; however, in August 2024, Mayor Bynum announced the creation of a commission to study and carry out a program of reparations.9) In the period between Bynum's election and his inauguration as mayor, a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed 40-year-old Black motorist, which deepened distrust between the community and the municipal administration.10 The city itself had limited tools to address some of the issues. Most public services, except public safety and infrastructure, were delivered through other authorities or voluntary associations. Tulsa's operating budget came mostly from sales tax, which fluctuated with economic conditions, and leaders had to be cautious about spending money. In fiscal year 2017-18, it totaled $268.9 million.11 Wagner recognized that he would have to address several challenges before Bynum could launch a survey that would help him understand resident priorities and well-being. First, the city did not have much in-house capacity to collect information, analyze it, and communicate the results. With a staff of only three people, the newly created Office of Performance Strategy and Innovation was small.12 It could put existing data to better use, but a large survey would require outside help. Survey research generated a lot of preparatory design work and public outreach; it created intense, time-sensitive administrative demands; and it required the ability to maintain the confidentiality of individual responses. A city office was not the best home for that kind of project-at least not under the institution's current capacity. Second, surveys were typically expensive to administer. Bynum had come to office in the middle of a budget year and therefore could not request additional funds quickly. Philanthropic organizations involved in service delivery could benefit from the information a survey would generate, but it would take time to persuade them to help finance the effort. Third, focusing on data might reduce the temperature of policy debate, but decisions made during survey design could create avenues for partisan bias. As a later Bloomberg News story noted, "Someone has to decide what information is collected or what hypothesis to test, and once data is collected or analyzed, someone has to decide how it's used."13 Fourth, across the United States, survey response rates had declined since the 1990s, affecting not only nongovernmental opinion polling but also government household surveys that helped generate important health and human services statistics.14 And in places where there was little trust in government-most often, poorer neighborhoods or minority households-low response rates could distort results. If few people contacted in such neighborhoods responded to a survey, compared with typically more-responsive residents of wealthier areas, then the findings might overrepresent opinion from more-affluent parts of town unless research managers took extra steps to mitigate that problem. Fifth, recent social science research had found that people's responses to surveys might not be reliable for a variety of reasons, such as limited knowledge of the subject, the effects of question order or phrasing, reactions to the interviewer, and headlines or seemingly unrelated events that temporarily altered opinions. (Similar cognitive challenges might further affect the public's ability to assess a government's past performance.Two social scientists, Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen, reviewed this evidence and its implications in a 2016 book, Democracy for Realists.15) FRAMING A RESPONSE Given all the challenges of setting up a survey, Wagner had to determine how to proceed and how to assess broader outcomes. According to Wagner, the mayor drew inspiration from Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, who previously served as the governor of Indiana. Before Daniels joined Purdue, the university had measured its success in terms of whether graduates regularly contributed to their alma mater. Daniels wanted to shift the focus to what made graduates successful in life. The university had collaborated with polling and consulting company Gallup, Inc., to learn more about the kinds of things that enabled Purdue University graduates to live fulfilling lives.16 Bynum wanted to pursue a similar approach in Tulsa. On his behalf, Wagner approached Gallup. He tracked down Justin Bibb, senior consultant and head of Gallup's global cities practice. Bibb visited Wagner to explain Gallup's approach and what a similar initiative in Tulsa might look like. Bibb also talked about Gallup's experience in other cities it had served. The company had a long history of helping policymakers better understand public opinion and perceived itself as important to a well-functioning democracy, although many other firms and nonprofit research centers offered similar services (text box 2). Text box 2: Polling and Democracy If a central ambition of democracies is government that is responsive to popular policy preferences as well as accountable for its performance, including respect for basic rights, how are we to ensure officials have a sense of what people want between elections? Can public opinion surveys, if well executed, help fill that gap? The Gallup Organization, later Gallup, Inc., had a long-standing commitment to the view that polls had an important role to play in democratic systems. During the 1930s, Iowa-born George Gallup promoted the importance of “learning and reporting ‘the will of the people.’” Gallup founded the American Institute of Public Opinion in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1935. By the 2020s, the organization had gained extensive experience in developing, administering, and analyzing opinion polls in almost every country in the world. But it was far from alone in those endeavors. By the 1950s and 1960s, opinion polling had become big business. And a distinctive view of the role of democracy underlay the phenomenon. Longtime Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport, like Gallup before him, saw elected representatives as delegates rather than trustees—at least under most circumstances. “The delegate model assumes that elected representatives are sent off to serve at the pleasure of the people they represent,” Newport wrote in a 2004 book for laypeople. “Representatives are to do their best to figure out what the people they represent are thinking and how those people would want them to vote,” he said, wrote adding that by contrast, the trustee model posits that voters elect individuals who have experience, judgment, or expertise to make decisions for them “subject to the occasional ratification of the public through the mechanism of the vote.” Expressing a stance many in the industry shared, Newport viewed polling as an aid to political leaders—“a scientific tool that can assess collective public opinion on an essentially continuous basis and if executed and analyzed properly, estimate the thoughts, attitudes, and perceptions of the entire country’s population.” See Gallup website https://www.gallup.com/corporate/178136/george-gallup.aspx and Frank Newport, Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People, New York: Warner Books, 2004, pp. 25–26, 39–41, and 62–63. The Gallup team explained its work on well-being and its definition of thriving as having positive views of one's current life and of the next five years.17 Noting that the city had only limited authority over many aspects of service delivery, Wagner and Gallup also realized it was important that other components of a survey focus on actionable goals-initiatives the mayor's administration could actually pursue-as well as on additional information that could assist organizations that delivered social services. Gallup proposed a mail survey, which people could complete on their own time and return in a prepaid envelope. Although phone surveys and online surveys were common, the mail survey was the gold standard in the United States. The operations costs associated with a mail survey were high, but response rates and completion rates were higher for mail surveys than for telephone surveys. Phone surveys were becoming increasingly problematical because many people used cell phones with area codes distant from where they currently lived, so it was usually difficult to know whether the person who picked up a call was actually a member of the population under study. Interviews, regardless of being on the phone or in person, could generate social desirability bias-a tendency to answer questions in a way others would view favorably. Further, people in minority households were less likely to respond to phone surveys than to questionnaires they received in the mail. And a web survey? Well, not everyone was online. Bynum and Wagner decided to move forward. The city needed the special capacities Gallup could offer. Moreover, engaging an independent outsider might encourage skeptical residents to answer questions and trust the results. Tulsa contracted with Gallup to perform that role. In addition to its specific experience with studies of well-being and other broad outcomes, the company had a large inventory of pretested questions to help it complete the project quickly and effectively. Bibb and the Gallup research lead, Grant Buckles, planned to facilitate meetings with stakeholders once the process was under way, coordinating with specialized Gallup teams to design the sample, refine the questionnaire, administer the survey, clean and analyze the data, and provide the city with a report and a final dataset with identifying information removed. Before sealing the deal, Wagner had to assemble two more elements required to transform the idea into reality: funding and buy-in from community groups. "We wanted the project to be a partnership between the city and Tulsa's philanthropic organizations and non-profit providers of social services," said Wagner. "Family and Children's Services, among other non-profit partners-we thought that because these groups were looking for outcomes too, they would find the project useful." Quality surveys were expensive to conduct, however, and few agreed to contribute to cover the cost. The exception was one of the city's big boosters, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Anne and Henry Zarrow Foundation. The Mission of the George Kaiser Family Foundation is to "support the community, state and other charities focused principally on reducing the cycle of poverty, mainly in the greater Tulsa area."18 Both foundations agreed to join the project. With these two grants, and after weeks of effort to seek contributions from other groups, Wagner recalled, "The mayor said, 'Just do it.'" The city footed the rest of the bill, using budget savings. The total cost of the survey was about $200,000. In his November 2017 State of the City address, Bynum announced the inaugural Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice Index, a survey that would benchmark residents' sense of well-being and provide helpful information about their priorities. Tulsa World, the city's main independent newspaper, communicated the goals of the survey and quoted Bynum as saying that "the city [would] use the insights to build the best city possible 'as that ideal is defined by Tulsans.'"19 GETTING DOWN TO WORK "Thriving-that was the north star from the beginning," said Buckles, the Gallup senior research consultant who engaged most closely with the city throughout the process. "We knew that's what we wanted to focus on," he added. "The mayor was inspired by the Gallup-Purdue index, and he wanted to transport a similar model to cities. That was a nonnegotiable" (text box 3). Text box 3: The Gallup–Purdue Index A Purdue University experiment inspired Tulsa CitiVoice. Beginning in 2013, Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation, which focused on improving the educational experience, teamed up with Purdue University president and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and Gallup, Inc., to learn more about what enabled students and alumni to flourish and to then translate that research into Purdue’s programs. By the mid-2000s, the rising cost of US higher education had become a national policy problem, prompting Daniels’s concern about the returns to a college degree and interest in whether universities and colleges could do better by their students. The results of the initial survey, the first of five, included responses from roughly 20,000 alumni who had graduated since 1975, as well as current students. The initial survey found that 39% of Purdue alumni strongly agreed the school had prepared them well for life—more than the 27% of graduates from all universities surveyed, taken together, but with plenty of room for improvement. Moreover, the university reported, “while most graduates are thriving in one or more key dimensions of well-being—purpose, social, financial, community, and physical—11% are thriving in all five categories.” The survey revealed that alumni and students with high levels of college debt were less likely to thrive than were those with little or no debt, so Daniels froze tuition—for a decade. Because campus work opportunities and internships correlated closely with subsequent senses of well-being, the university invested heavily in experiential learning, internships, and on-the-job training. The survey further found that a single positive experience with a professor who made students excited to learn and who served as a mentor boosted the likelihood that a student would flourish later in life, thereby prompting more attention to student–faculty engagement. “Our survey clearly indicated that it wasn’t so much where you go to college as much as it is how you go to college: what you extract from the campus experience,” said Daniels. Sources: See Purdue University’s Newsroom at https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/gallup/ and specific reports at https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2014/Q2/gallup-purdue-index-releases-inaugural-findings-of-national-landmark-study.html ; https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2014/Q4/only-1-in-3-college-students-getting-key-work-experience-they-need,-according-to-survey.html and https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2014/Q3/purdue-releases-its-first-alumni-results-as-part-of-gallup-purdue-index.html. On tuition policies, see National Public Radio, “Purdue’s reputation for affordability results in substantial growth for the school,” September 6, 2022, at https://www.npr.org/2022/09/06/1121201296/purdues-reputation-for-affordability-results-in-substantial-growth-for-the-schoo. On Mitch Daniels as governor, see ISS case study “A New Approach to Managing at the Center of Government: Governor Mitch Daniels and Indiana, 2005–2012.” Preparing the questions Developing the survey instrument was a lengthy process. Wagner and Bibb first assembled an advisory board called the Community Indicators Working Group.20 "We involved all the academic institutions in town, the health department, city departments, and some of the philanthropic foundations, like the George Kaiser Family Foundation," he said. The group's membership generally numbered about 20 people-maybe a few more or a few less depending on the meeting-and the mayor often joined as well. Wagner and Bibb moderated the conversations.21 At the first meeting, Buckles said, "The mayor drew a distinction between outcomes and outputs, and I hadn't really heard elected officials do that before. He really wanted the metrics we focused on to be about improving outcomes rather than just measuring whether the trash was picked up on time or how much time it took to respond to 9-1-1 emergency calls." Gradually, the group converged on three broad sets of questions, as reported by Public Radio Tulsa: * Do residents view Tulsa as a destination to live and work? * Do Tulsans have access to the basic needs and services required to lead healthy, productive, and fulfilling lives? * How do local institutions, organizations, and Tulsans themselves contribute to improving their local community?22 "We had the local participants give general ideas to Gallup," Wagner said, "and then Gallup came back with draft questions." Further discussion helped refine the question list and some of the phrasing. In a later round-the reaction to a draft questionnaire-Wagner and Gallup focused on whether the data generated would be useful to the city department concerned or to the association that managed a service. The process took a little more than two months-from February to April 2018. Gallup had considerable experience in assessing well-being, said Gallup Principal Dan Foy, who was overseeing much of Gallup's work with cities at the time. The company routinely asked about well-being in many of its community surveys as well as in its World Poll, starting in 2005, and ongoing tracking polls. It was also using versions of the well-being index to assist the Blue Zones Project, an effort to improve community health and well-being as inspired by research into the basis of longevity in communities with high concentrations of centenarians. (A best-selling nonfiction book by journalist Dan Buettner had launched the Blue Zones Project.) The Community Indicators Working Group advisory board considered other possible outcomes too. At the time, Oklahoma was also the site of a lot of experimentation on how to boost hope. The offices of the governor and first lady had teamed up with Chan Hellman, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, on a project called Hope Rising that worked with state agencies and non-profit organizations in Tulsa, as well as the city government, to help people acquire stronger skills in setting and achieving personal goals.23 Hellman defined hope as a process-specifically, as a form of strategic planning.24 People who had hope were also people who tended to set goals and to plan steps to achieve those aims. The concept was related to thriving but nonetheless different. The survey draft that emerged from the advisory board interaction did not ask specifically about those aspects of individual behavior. Nor, for want of space, did it ask about all of the many other subjects advisers proposed. "Our key question was-imagine a ladder with 10 steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top," Wagner said. "The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?" A second question asked respondents where they thought they would be, on this ladder, in five years' time. If someone replied 7 or above on the first question and 8 or above on the second, they were deemed "thriving." The ladder question had been developed by social scientist Hadley Cantril in the 1960s (text box 4 and full questionnaire in the case appendix). Text box 4: Well Being Gallup linked thriving with the notion of subjective well-being, or life satisfaction. Life satisfaction reflected a respondent’s evaluation of life. It was different from the experience of happiness, which was more of an affect, a feeling. The subject of life satisfaction had a distinctive pedigree. Back in the 1960s, Hadley Cantril, a Princeton University psychology professor deeply interested in opinion research, developed an 11-point self-anchoring life satisfaction assessment. In 2005, Gallup added a version of the Cantril ladder question to its annual World Poll, which drew representative samples of people from 132 countries. Using that data and other information, social scientists later tried to assess how individual components of well-being and other circumstances or aptitudes and orientations related to overall perception of life satisfaction. Along with his colleague Alan Kreuger, Princeton University economist Angus Deaton wrote extensively on the subject. Deaton noted that although social scientists expected other components of well-being to be strongly associated with perceptions of life satisfaction, the relationships often turned out to be less straightforward than expected. For example, people in wealthier countries tended to report higher rates of life satisfaction than did people in lower-income countries, with occasional exceptions. But at a given level of national income, the effects of economic growth on life satisfaction were usually negative, and objective measures of health often appeared unrelated to overall levels of life satisfaction. See “Understanding How Gallup Uses the Cantril Scale: Development of the “Thriving, Struggling Suffering Categories,” Gallup News. Angus Deaton, “Income, Health, and Well-Being around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 22, 2, Spring 2008: 53–72. Steve Crabtree, “The Economics of Happiness: Leading economists are joining researchers who seek new approaches to measuring—and influencing—well-being,” Gallup Business Journal, January 10, 2008, https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/103549/economics-happiness.aspx. The ladder question had several advantages over alternatives, said Gallup Partner Foy. Because Gallup had used the question in many of its surveys, it "could situate what clients were learning, because it could show comparisons to people's responses in other settings," he noted. Buckles added, "These questions enabled us to benchmark Tulsa against other metros or geographic units-like the state of Oklahoma." Gallup took the other priority subject matter and transformed it into questions too. This step required great care because question wording could introduce error or bias into findings. One way to reduce such risk was to test, or validate, the questions in advance. Gallup had a bank of questions it had already tested to ensure that the questions would tap respondents' underlying attitudes, orientations, or sentiments of interest and that all respondents would understand the words in the same way. The process involved cognitive interviews to ascertain what people thought a given question meant, what in the question confused them, and whether they answered the question the same way when the question was posed again. The company also monitored questions to identify whether respondents often asked for clarification, had trouble placing a response in the categories offered, or declined to answer. And it often used other data to analyze whether responses to questions measuring similar things lined up with the responses to the proposed questions in expected ways. Although Gallup had a large stock of pretested questions, it had to create custom options to meet some of the priorities the committee had identified. "Gallup gave the custom options the white glove treatment," Buckles said. "We invested in cognitive testing to ensure that all respondents would interpret the questions in the same way." He recalled cold-calling Tulsans to talk about what word choices and phrasing meant to them. "We got great feedback to questions like, 'Is highway a word you use in Tulsa? or do you instead talk about the freeway, the parkway, or the interstate?'" (The Gallup team went with "highways, roads, and bridges.") Although the survey took place two years before Black Lives Matter focused national attention on unfair or abusive treatment of Black residents by police, public safety was a sensitive subject and drew special scrutiny. "The city asked for questions on policing, and we worried that those kinds of questions might prove sensitive with the public safety people," Buckles said. "We wanted to include questions about whether residents felt they personally knew a police officer who worked in the neighborhood. We were trying to get at personal relationships." He said he was impressed by the police department's openness. "They were trying to improve, and they wanted the feedback." With a long list of questions in place, the group then had to trim its choices to a number that respondents could reasonably answer. Foy said Gallup usually aimed for 45 to 50 questions so as to limit respondent burden and maximize response rates. Further, because a mail survey was printed on a folded sheet of 11- by 17-inch paper, the choice was between one folded sheet of four pages or two folded sheets of eight pages, with significantly increased printing and mailing costs. The team settled on four. "Often, you get lots of stakeholders, and everybody gets their pet question, and you end up with 50 to 100 different metrics," said Buckles. "In some ways it's useless, because no one is going to sit still and answer a survey that long, or you just get so much data that you don't know what to do with it. So, the prioritization piece was really critical." Designing the sample While those conversations were in progress, Gallup coordinated the sample design. To enable the city to draw reliable inferences about the views of a larger population from a small sample, every Tulsa household had to have an equal probability of being selected to respond. To that end, Gallup planned to draw a random sample from a comprehensive list of all households within the city limits. Unlike some other countries, the United States does not have a central registry of all households, and therefore, pollsters have to find other sources of information to come as close as possible to a central list. Address-based sampling, by drawing from postal addresses, had several advantages, though Gallup sometimes took other approaches and created tailor-made samples based on school neighborhoods or other units. Assembling the list of postal addresses proved not quite as straightforward a task as anticipated. Beginning in 1963, the US Postal Service grouped addresses by zip code, or Zone Improvement Plan code, so it could reduce the number of people needed to sort mail and deliver each envelope or package to the right address.25 In theory, then, it was possible to obtain lists of all addresses in any given zip code in order to define the population, or universe, from which to draw the sample. But zip codes did not always align with the boundaries of political jurisdictions, and in this instance, the sampling team discovered that because the city boundaries, which included 23 zip codes, ran through parts of seven or eight, it would have to draw some of the addresses census tract by census tract, a time-consuming process. Further, because survey responses were usually harder to secure in Black neighborhoods where trust in government was low or in neighborhoods with Spanish-speaking populations, the plan was to oversample those households, using Gallup models that pinpointed households as likely minority or likely Spanish speaking. The company's policy was to ensure a minimum of 100 respondents from each main demographic. Gallup planned to weight the responses as a way of ensuring that the overall sample would match Tulsa City demography. Weighting was always tricky because it carried a risk that a few respondents would have outsized importance in representing opinion in a neighborhood in which many declined to answer. However, Gallup's minimum number of respondents for key demographics-at least 100 in each-helped alleviate that problem. Gallup wrote that "the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2 percentage points at the 95% confidence interval."26 One further step was required to define the sample. Responses might vary according to which person in a household answered the survey. Therefore, in order to ensure a random sample of different age-groups and genders, Gallup specified that the household member aged 18 years or older next in line to have a birthday should be the one to reply-an approach it used in many of its surveys.27 Given anticipated nonresponse rates, which were based on industry experience, the final plan was to sample about 22,500 people so as to attract roughly 4,500 responses. Administering and analyzing the survey The next steps were routine. Gallup's graphic designers produced the brochure that people would receive in the mail, and the mayor's team publicized the project by encouraging Tulsans who received the survey to respond. The company sent an initial notice to selected households and followed up with the survey itself, a prepaid return envelope, and a $2 bill as an incentive. Tests had shown that $2 was small enough not to cause respondents to offer more-positive replies than they might otherwise have provided, yet because $2 bills were uncommon, the request caught people's attention. Many opinion research organizations used $2 bills for that reason. In addition, likely Spanish-speaking households received both Spanish and English versions of the survey. Gallup followed up with reminders in the form of three postcards, each of them a week apart. Wagner and Bynum urged people to complete the surveys and send them back. The city issued a press release at the end of November 2017, announcing the project and encouraging residents to participate. The press release described the survey as "a first-of-its-kind assessment for cities across the nation to measure how their residents are faring on matters of well-being, opportunity, and the city experience." Bynum explained that "the Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice Index will measure the most important outcomes for city residents and provide local leaders with insights we can use in building the best city possible. Not only will the index be incredibly useful for us in delivering a better city for Tulsans, but we believe it will also instruct discussions around civic issues nationally."28 Tulsa World and other outlets picked up the press release. Kevin Canfield, writing for Tulsa World, said, "It has a long, tongue-twisting name but the survey sent to 22,500 Tulsans on Monday is meant to answer the simple question, How's life in Tulsa treating you?" Canfield's article explained the rationale for the survey and what Tulsans should expect, such as the number of questions and their nature.29 As respondents mailed back their questionnaires, Gallup staff scanned the forms and prepared the data for the team that would conduct the analysis. By the end of the initial survey period, 4,428 Tulsans out of the 22,500 contacted had returned their surveys-a response rate of almost 20%, which was slightly better than the industry standard, Buckles said. Analyzing the data and reporting out Gallup's quality control procedures required that one person conduct the initial data analysis and then another conduct a second, replication analysis. A Gallup research scientist conducted the initial analysis. Buckles did the replication. "All it takes is one line of code to mess things up," he said, "so ensuring that more than one person is doing the analysis end to end is one of the key quality control steps." Buckles also helped Gallup editors, trained in data reporting, develop a public-facing report that did not require readers to understand the statistical methods in use. The initial report rested heavily on bar charts or distributions in responses within key demographics. But communicating results effectively was not always easy. Not everyone immediately grasped why it was possible to draw inferences about the whole population from interviews with a relatively small number of people. Gallup tried to work with city officials to help them explain the logic clearly and simply and to share the main findings. "We had to iterate a lot on how to talk about the results in order to give city officials more confidence," Buckles said. "It was actually a very big sample for a city survey, but the team had to work hard to reassure residents that they could trust the results." Moving beyond bar charts and presenting the analysis on broader outcomes, such as the influences that appeared to shape well-being and, especially, thriving, proved even more challenging. The team could not throw an ordinary least-squares regression analysis into a public report, much less a logit or probit regression, whose results were even less easily interpretable. Gallup editors helped the city hone the language used. Gallup later worked with the city to conduct more-advanced analysis on what drove thriving, though much of that work took place after a second survey of similar size, in mid-January 2020. This analysis used more-elaborate statistical techniques that the company staff then had to render understandable for the general public. Wagner engaged some of the members of his team in this effort, and the city used machine learning to examine lots of variables that would show how income, demography, sense of safety, community engagement, and other factors influenced thriving. OVERCOMING OBSTACLES "The biggest surprise to me-a good one-was how much the project was embraced by everyone," said Gallup liaison Buckles. "I initially had high expectations for the project but was unsure how it would be received.. If you're a public official, there is so much data everywhere that it's hard to break through the noise. There's always a Brookings report or a Bloomberg report. So I wasn't necessarily sure we would break through locally or nationally, but the effort was positively regarded and owned. And there were even cartoons in the local paper, showing how cool the project was". Gallup's 2018 public-facing report, Building a Thriving Tulsa, headlined some of the key findings. Priorities The survey left no one in doubt about one of the cross-community priorities. Tulsa World wrote: "When the Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice Index survey asked thousands of Tulsans in 2018 what was most needed to improve the city, the No. 1 answer-ahead of better schools, better jobs and public safety-was better roads, highways and bridges."30 Many Black respondents flagged the high cost of food and housing as their top concerns, but a majority of those surveyed, in all the main demographic groups, expressed dismay over the quality of roads, highways, and bridges, as well as the public schools. Policing. The 2018 and 2020 surveys asked a number of questions about public safety. Perceptions of the police varied by ethnic group, with Black residents considerably less likely than others to say the police department treated them fairly. Both the police department and the city had anticipated that result, but they were eager to look beneath the central tendencies to learn from variation within groups. Thriving. "Tulsans are optimistic that the city is improving as a place to live," the 2018 report argued. "Nearly twice as many residents believe the city of Tulsa is getting better (47%) than getting worse (24%) as a place to live." In a similar vein, the report noted that a majority "strongly agreed that it was a good time to find a job in the city, compared to 19% who disagreed. And 58% said they thought it was a good place to start a business, compared to 16% who strongly disagreed." But the news was not all positive. Although half of all Tulsans indicated that they were thriving, 46% said they were struggling, and 4% claimed to be suffering.31 The report on the 2018 survey compared the well-being responses-the ladder questions-with those provided by residents in benchmark cities and found that a smaller proportion of Tulsans reported they were flourishing, or thriving, compared with counterparts in Louisville and other comparable cities, as well as the state and the country overall. Where people placed themselves on the ladder varied with income, but within demographic groups-even among those less well-off-there was considerable variation. The puzzle was to figure out what drove the result. After the second survey, Wagner's office worked with people at local universities as well as at Gallup to try to decipher the puzzle. As the analysis proceeded, the team found that the circumstances that influenced thriving most strongly were, in order of importance (1) inclusion and belonging, (2) perceptions of safety, (3) access to affordable housing, (4) community support, and (5) economic growth opportunities. Easy access to high-quality childcare or education was a top driver for parents of children 8 years or younger. One of the key findings of the analysis was that a person's sense of neighborhood belonging correlated strongly with whether the person was thriving-even controlling for things like wealth or zip code. "Hyperlocal experiences represented one of the key predictors," Buckles said. For example, residents with less than $50,000 in annual household income were more likely to say they were thriving when they knew of a local organization they could turn to for help in getting healthcare, housing, or food or if someone was living near them to whom they could reach out when facing a personal crisis. The mayor's stated aim was to use the survey as a guide for policy and programs, a demonstration of responsive government, but an unfortunate series of unexpected events almost immediately slowed the effort to a near standstill. Heavy snows in the Rocky Mountains during the winter of 2018, followed by the third-wettest May since 1894, swelled the Arkansas River and unleashed a historic flood that made many streets in the region impassable and closed schools. May 2019 also saw heightened tornado activity. Local radio reported that "between May 16 and May 24‬ the National Weather Service issued 122 tornado warnings across the state, most centered on NE Oklahoma and the Tulsa metro area."32 On the first of June, the White House declared a state of emergency. In the early months of 2020, just as life in the city was returning to normal, the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the mayor's office had to pivot to respond. And afterthe city and community adapted and established new routines, a 2021 ransomware attack struck the municipal data systems.33 (The mayor's office reported that alarms enabled officials to shut down access and limit the damage.) A CitiVoice dashboard was in development when COVID and the ransomware attack struck. Complicating matters further, Wagner, who was central to the CitiVoice project, had to step out of his leadership role in Performance and Innovation to fill the shoes of the city's chief financial officer, who passed away unexpectedly. Wagner said the city never officially released the second CitiVoice report. ASSESSING RESULTS Although Bynum had to adapt, he did not forget. He had aimed to use Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice data to help heal division and to promote initiatives that would enable residents to thrive, and when he could, he moved that plan forward. He continually cited the results in his State of the City addresses, his requests for program funding, and his announcements of new initiatives. Acting on resident priorities. Both surveys had revealed strong public interest in improving roads and bridges. In 2019, the mayor pointed to that interest to build public support for a bond issue that would help pay for infrastructure investment. Voters overwhelmingly approved his request and did so again, later.34 The city began to install new streetlights in 2020 because survey respondents said Tulsans felt unsafe on dark streets.35 More than half of the residents in all three of the largest ethnic groups expressed concern about the quality of the public schools as well. Under Oklahoma law, however, the city had relatively few tools at its disposal to improve K-12 education.36 Furthermore, the state government would reduce its contribution if the city tried to add to state funds. Even if the survey revealed a strong consensus for improving public education, the Tulsa municipal government did not always have the power to act. The mayor initiated conversations about other options. Policing. The city worked with the police to host follow-up conversations about how to improve public safety services. Tulsa launched an Office of the Independent Monitor and introduced changes in practices and personnel. It also created the Equality Indicators initiative, an effort to build stronger rapport between residents and the police through a series of open, transparent, and publicly accessible meetings to "help everyone in [the] community understand why the numbers are what they are and what steps can be taken to improve outcomes."37 Well-being. Above all, the mayor said he wanted to help residents thrive. Because analysis of the CitiVoice data revealed that a sense of neighborhood belonging was central to the sense of well-being, the city decided to invest in experiments that would build those connections. In 2023, it created a new Department of City Experience to improve conditions and social capital at the neighborhood level. Wagner left his post as chief financial officer to lead the new initiative, which was still in early stages in mid-2024. "I spent most of the first year getting the right people in place," Wagner said. "We moved the city planning office from the council of regional governments to city hall. That was an important step. "Zoning had always been administered outside the city, by the regional government. The challenge was that it was disconnected from what going on at city hall. We enforced the zoning code but didn't staff the people administered the zoning code. So we brought planning to city hall and set up an urban design studio and a community development group, along with a neighborhood development office that wasn't just about code enforcement and animal control, as it had been earlier." Wagner initiated a pilot version of a planned Neighborhood Academy to foster participation by civic-minded young leaders within communities. "It's a big place and we don't have a planner for every neighborhood," Wagner said, "so we need to find folks who want to make their neighborhoods better places." He stressed the need to build coalitions around what people wanted, not just around what they didn't want. The Neighborhood Academy aimed to build that capacity. It launched a series of courses to teach young leaders how to create and run a neighborhood association, identify goals by mapping neighborhood needs and completing a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), work with partners, collaborate with the city, and measure and maintain success, among other subjects. The city also introduced a Neighborhood Condition Index in the form of a report on every neighborhood that could help people understand priorities, as well as neighborhood resource centers where people could go to address a problem like reducing the number of loose dogs, which had become serious in some areas. Although the city of Tulsa used the survey results to inform decision-making and investment, the boards, agencies, and nonprofits that operated social services appeared to have made less use of the information than initially anticipated, Wagner said. "The 2018 report made a big splash. But we didn't really know how it was later used by other groups," Wagner said, adding that "the other agencies and nonprofits that provided social services could also have run with some of the information and ideas." Hope researcher Hellman added that broader community participation during the early stages of project planning might have encouraged greater use of the data by nonprofits and community foundations. REFLECTIONS Using his Results for America connection as a soapbox, city planner James Wagner urged other midsize cities to adopt CitiVoice and thereby both help mayors connect with residents and enable cities to learn from one another. Gallup team members Justin Bibb and Grant Buckles also presented the project to Miami, Austin, and other municipalities. Participants credited the project's success to Mayor G. T. Bynum, whose enthusiasm and vision pulled others into the effort. Wagner said, "People were inspired by him." Oklahoma University professor Chan Hellman agreed: "G.T. has done a really good job. I don't know many mayors who are viewed as positively as G.T. Bynum is communitywide." "It was a city administration that seemed to genuinely embrace incorporation of citizen feedback and points of view into its decision-making," Buckles said. "A lot of times you put out a report and it gets lots of media attention. People use it and cite it and all that, but this project was one of my favorites because it had so many practical applications and they are actually still using it." Addendum: At the time of this research, G. T. Bynum announced he would not run for a third term as mayor and would finish out his term in 2024. Justin Bibb left the project earlier and ran a successful 2021 campaign for mayor of Cleveland, becoming the second-youngest mayor in that city's history. Grant Buckles signed on with Meta Platforms, which operated Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, though he maintained contact with Tulsa and James Wagner, who was continuing to translate survey findings into action. References 1 Estimates vary because of differences between enumeration areas and local government boundaries as well as date and form of data collection. See US census for Tulsa County: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/tulsacountyoklahoma,dallascountytexas/PST045223 ; Tulsa City source at https://www.cityoftulsa.org/press-room/greater-tulsa-area-indian-affairs-commission-to-host-native-american-day-festivities-oct-9-at-dream-keepers-park/. For Tulsa Metro, see also https://www.statista.com/statistics/432678/us-metropolitan-areas-with-the-highest-percentage-of-american-native-population/#:~:text=Among%20the%2078%20largest%20metropolitan,Indian%2FAlaska%20Native%20in%202019. On jurisdiction, see Tucker Higgins and Dan Mangan, "Supreme Court says eastern half of Oklahoma is Native American land," CNBC, July 9, 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/09/supreme-court-says-eastern-half-of-oklahoma-is-native-american-land.html. 2 See Politico at https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/oklahoma/. Click on Tulsa County. 3 G. T. Bynum, "A Republican mayor's plan to replace partisanship with policy," TED Talk, November 2017. https://www.ted.com/speakers/g_t_bynum. 4 Susan Everly-Douze, "What's Doing in Tulsa," New York Times, August 27, 1989. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/27/travel/what-s-doing-in-tulsa.html. 5 "Business Opportunities," Tulsa Metro Chamber of Commerce, September 1, 2006. Accessed through the WaybackMachine at https://web.archive.org/web/20060901121037/http://tulsaok.usachamber.com/custom2.asp?pageid=1190. 6 Data USA. Accessed July 9, 2024, at Data USA, https://datausa.io/profile/geo/tulsa-ok/#economy. 7 Data USA. Accessed July 9, 2024, at Data USA, https://datausa.io/profile/geo/tulsa-ok/#economy. 8 Kweku Larry Crowe, "The 1921 Tulsa Massacre," Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, 42, 1, Winter 2012. https://www.neh.gov/article/1921-tulsa-massacre. 9 Sean Murphy, "Oklahoma Supreme Court dismisses lawsuit of last Tulsa Race Massacre survivors seeking reparations," AP News, June 12, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/1921-race-massacre-tulsa-black-survivors-b7a4c83514ce79640a8490d49efb9006. Kate Selig, "Tulsa Creates Commission on Reparations for Race Massacre," New York Times, August, 23, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/03/us/tulsa-race-massacre-reparations-oklahoma.html. 10 Death of Terence Crutcher on September 16, 2016. Police officer Betty Jo Shelby was later found not guilty of manslaughter. Erik Ortiz and Phil Helsel, "Jury Acquits Tulsa Officer Betty Shelby in Shooting Death of Terence Crutcher," NBC News, May 17, 2017. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jury-acquits-tulsa-officer-shooting-death-terence-crutcher-n761206. 11 City of Tulsa Annual Budget and Capital Plan, Fiscal Year 2017-2018. https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/4455/annualbudgetfy2017-2018.pdf. 12 Bloomberg-OECD City Innovation website. https://cities-innovation-oecd.com/cities/tulsa-us/. 13 Sarah Holder, "The Data Brigade of Tulsa, Oklahoma," Bloomberg.com, July 2, 2018. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-02/the-secret-weapon-of-tulsa-s-republican-mayor. For more on the program's work, see "A Chat with James Wagner, the Newly Named Chief of Performance Strategy and Innovation at City Hall," Rich Fisher, Tulsa Public Radio, December 15, 2016. https://www.publicradiotulsa.org/studiotulsa/2016-12-15/a-chat-with-james-wagner-the-newly-named-chief-of-performance-strategy-and-innovation-at-city-hall. 14 On declining rates in opinion polling, see Courtney Kennedy and Hannah Hartig, "Response rates in telephone surveys have resumed their decline," PEW Research Center, February 27, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/02/27/response-rates-in-telephone-surveys-have-resumed-their-decline. On federal surveys, see https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/private/pdf/255531/Decliningresponserates.pdf and John Boyle, "Declining survey response rates are a problem-here's why," ICF. https://www.icf.com/insights/health/declining-survey-response-rate-problem. 15 Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, Princeton University Press, 2016. 16 "Measuring the Most Important Outcomes of Higher Education," Purdue University. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/gallup/. 17 Gallup sometimes used responses to two life satisfaction questions in its "thriving" index and at other times used multiple index components. See Gallup, "Why Wellbeing Is Important: What is the cost of poor wellbeing?" at https://www.gallup.com/workplace/215924/well-being.aspx#:~:text=Gallup%20Net%20Thriving%20is%20derived,negative%20views%20of%20the%20future. 18 The George Kaiser Family Foundation focuses on improving early childhood development. However, its mandate is broader. Its website notes that "GKFF is a Type I 509(a)3 supporting organization of the Tulsa Community Foundation. The purpose of GKFF is to support the community, state and other charities focused principally on reducing the cycle of poverty, mainly in the greater Tulsa area." Accessed at https://www.gkff.org/faq/ See FAQ on the difference between the GKFF and the Tulsa Community Foundation. 19 Kevin Canfield, "Mayor Bynum's State of the City address includes six new initiatives," Tulsa World, November 2, 2017. https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/mayor-bynums-state-of-the-city-address-includes-six-new-initiatives/articl_392085a4-de4c-596e-a1d0-691683e9a067.html. 20 "Building a Thriving Tulsa," Gallup, 2018 report. https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/9389/gallup_tulsa_citivoice_2018_final-report2.pdf. The second report, "A Roadmap to Thriving in Tulsa: Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice Index Analysis," Gallup, 2021, was never posted online. 21 "A Roadmap to Thriving in Tulsa: Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice Index Analysis," Gallup, 2021. 22 Rick Fisher interview with James Wagner, "The City of Tulsa's James Wagner Explains the Newly Posted 2018 Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice Index," Public Radio Tulsa, January 14, 2019. https://www.publicradiotulsa.org/studiotulsa/2019-01-14/the-city-of-tulsas-james-wagner-explains-the-newly-posted-2018-gallup-tulsa-citivoice-index. 23 Hope Rising website. https://hoperisingoklahoma.org/about-us/. 24 Ginnie Graham, "The Science of Hope," Sooner 40(2), Winter 2020. https://soonermag.oufoundation.org/stories/the-science-of-hope#:~:text=of%20later%20success.-,Chan%20Hellman,%E2%80%9CIt's%20strategic%20planning. 25 US Postal Service Inspector General, "The Untold Story of the ZIP Code," report number RARC-WP-13-006, April 1, 2013. https://www.uspsoig.gov/reports/white-papers/untold-story-zip-code#:~:text=In%201963%20the%20Post%20Office,an%20organizing%20and%20enabling%20device. 26 Gallup, Building a Thriving Tulsa, 2018 Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice Index Results. https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/9389/gallup_tulsa_citivoice_2018_final-report2.pdf. 27 Gallup, Building a Thriving Tulsa, 2018 Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice Index Results. https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/9389/gallup_tulsa_citivoice_2018_final-report2.pdf. 28 "City of Tulsa Partners with Gallup to Create New Tool for Measuring Quality of Life in Cities," City of Tulsa Press Room, November 28, 2017. https://www.cityoftulsa.org/press-room/city-of-tulsa-partners-with-gallup-to-create-new-tool-for-measuring-quality-of-life-in-cities/. 29 Kevin Canfield, "City surveying more than 20,000 residents about city services, overall well-being," Tulsa World, July 17, 2018. https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/city-surveying-more-than-20-000-residents-about-city-services-overall-well-being/article_7a9706e0-62fb-54d8-977d-b7d50f86a979.html. 30 Editorial, "Improve Our Tulsa Tax Extension Aims as Tulsans' Biggest Priority-Streets and Bridges," Tulsa World, October 6, 2019. https://tulsaworld.com/opinion/editorials/tulsa-world-editorial-improve-our-tulsa-tax-extension-aims-at-tulsans-biggest-priority--/article_3fb0b71c-a26b-57a0-9c51-7bb9cffe242b.html. 31 Gallup, Building a Thriving Tulsa, 2018 Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice Index Results. https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/9389/gallup_tulsa_citivoice_2018_final-report2.pdf. 32KJHR Digital, "Five Years Later: May 2019 Flooding," May 21, 2024, 2 News Oklahoma. https://www.kjrh.com/news/local-news/five-years-later-may-2019-flooding#:~:text=Beyond%20the%20flooding%20impact%20May,and%20the%20Tulsa%20metro%20area. 33 Sharon Phillips, "Story behind the ransomware attack on the City of Tulsa," 2 News Oklahoma, July 22, 2021, updated July 24, 2021. https://www.kjrh.com/news/local-news/story-behind-the-ransomware-attack-on-the-city-of-tulsa. 34 https://www.tulsacouncil.org/improveourtulsa. 35 Kevin Canfield, "City resumes installing neighborhood street lights requested by Tulsa residents," Tulsa World, July 9, 2020. https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/city-resumes-installing-neighborhood-street-lights-requested-by-tulsa-residents/article_47dbfa06-8ffd-5f1a-8e31-0c9fac18a133.html. 36 See Barry Friedman, "G. T. Bynum, mayoral ghosts, and the Reagan sofa," part 3 of a multipart series, TulsaPeople, 2018. https://www.tulsapeople.com/the-voice/writers/barry-friedman/g-t-bynum-mayoral-ghosts-and-the-reagan-sofa/article_49c5fcee-2614-5cdb-b69e-5f9d4630872c.html. Earlier parts of the series appear at https://www.tulsapeople.com/the-voice/writers/barry-friedman/bynum-through-the-storm/article_d0f9766a-8fc0-5f53-9b85-66c809c752d8.html. 37 Tulsa City Council, Proposed Public Meetings Exploring Equality Indicators Report for 2018 and 2019, March 13, 2019. https://www.cityoftulsa.org/media/18549/public_meetings_equality_indicators_proposal.pdf. Innovations for Successful Societies makes its case studies and other publications available to all at no cost under the guidelines of the Terms of Use listed below. The ISS Web repository is intended to serve as an idea bank, enabling practitioners and scholars to evaluate the pros and cons of different reform strategies and weigh the effects of context. 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