Public Health in the Rockies 2026

Community organizations know the importance of reliable, representative, local data, especially for smaller geographical areas and subpopulations. The landscape of local data is changing, and public health agencies need to adapt as well. Since 2007, the Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment (WCDPHE) has conducted a triennial household-based Community Health Survey (CHS) using scientific random sampling to obtain population-level metrics for Weld County adults. Over the past few survey cycles resident response rates have steadily declined (similar to national trends). Therefore, for the 2025 CHS WCDPHE collaborated with healthcare partners (who utilize WCDPHE’s local data), to launch an incentive program in the hope that it would boost the response rate.

Agreements were made with local healthcare partners for their financial support and in return preliminary findings were shared with them in advance of the public data release. The CHS was sent out to 20,000 randomly selected households with instructions to claim a “$5 reward for completing the survey”. As part of the program a reward platform vendor was selected to distribute the post-survey incentives.

The 2025 CHS response rate increased by 36% with the most improvement in Greeley/Evans and the Southwest regions of the county. Younger and lower income residents requested incentives more often compared to older and higher income residents. This indicates there is potential for incentives to boost response rates for the aforementioned hard-to reach groups. Overall cost of the incentive program was around $12,500.

Higher incentive request rates from hard-to-reach populations support the notion that incentive effectively promote survey participation. This successful partnership demonstrates that robust, high-quality data at a local level is still achievable in a time when data is getting harder to come by.