Justification for change

MEMORANDUM

DATE: February 5, 2007

SUBJECT: Request for Clearance of 2007 America’s Children and the Environment Customer Satisfaction Survey under Voluntary Customer Satisfaction ICR 1711.05, OMB number 2090-0019

FROM: Maggie Miller, Innovations and Emerging Challenges Division

National Center for Environmental Economics, Office of Policy, Economics, and Innovation (1809T)

THRU: Michelle Mandolia, Customer Service Director (1807T)

National Center for Environmental Innovation

and

Carolyn Scully, ICR Desk Officer (2822T)

Office of Environmental Information

TO: EPA Desk Officer

Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Office of Management and Budget

An important undertaking for NCEE in recent years has been America’s Children and the Environment (ACE). Two of these EPA reports have been published, and the information can also be found on the web. These reports pull together available data to report on trends and the status of important factors related to children’s environmental health. They are a key part of efforts to characterize children’s health as it relates to the environment by providing important information for the public and policy makers on the status and trends of children’s health. This valuable information can be used to monitor progress in efforts to protect children’s health and develop priorities for future efforts.

The process for development of America's Children and the Environment has included workshops where input has been obtained from experts associated with academic institutions, federal agencies, state and local governments, and nonprofit organizations. As it prepares for future work on ACE, NCEE would like gain a better understanding of how well the current ACE content meets the needs of current website users, and the types of information these users would desire.

One way NCEE is looking to accomplish these goals is through input from users of the ACE website. NCEE would like to monitor customer satisfaction through surveys. The results will assist NCEE in understanding the helpfulness of the website based on perspectives from users of children’s health indicators, the ease of navigating through the website, and the satisfaction of the content provided. The results will help NCEE make pertinent updates to organization of and contents of the America’s Children and the Environment website. NCEE will have a better idea on how to address customer needs and satisfaction and incorporate those ideas into the editing of the website. To collect qualitative data on user satisfaction, NCEE has developed an ACE Customer Satisfaction survey.

The survey is completely voluntary and will appear as a link on the website to anyone who may visit the website. The survey asks 13 questions and should take respondents approximately 10 minutes to complete. It is estimated that 100 people per year will answer the survey. This amounts to a total annual burden of about 16.7 hours to respondents. The estimated total annual burden to EPA for feedback collection, analysis, and reporting is 8 hours.

The questionnaire consists of 13 questions addressing the following: one general demographic question, two technical questions about visiting the website, eight satisfaction questions about how satisfied our customers are with the quality of the subject matter and presentation of the information, and two open-ended satisfaction questions that would more specifically define the needs and expectations of the website users and allow us to make more appropriate targeted improvements to the site.

During evaluation of the survey results, we will be able to determine whether the information provided on the website was valuable and useful to the viewers. We will be able to determine if the overall subject matter and more specifically if the topics currently addressed on the website are important to the users of the website or if changes need to be made in order to include different information that would be more satisfactory. Also, customer satisfaction may vary according to the types of presentations of data they prefer. Each of these variables may influence customer satisfaction with the entire or portions of the website. This feedback, along with the question of if the user plans to visit the website again in the future, will allow us to determine whether the website meets the needs of the visitors to the website. In addition, the question on how respondents first learned about the site will let us know where to increase our outreach efforts.

We anticipate having the survey up continuously on the website in order to get as many responses as possible. We plan to analyze the results as they become available, keeping detailed records of answer choices in a spreadsheet and determining the sections where customer satisfaction is low. We will use results of the survey to inform our continuing efforts to improve the website design and to develop new content for the website.

All responses will be stored in a database. The resources invested in implementing recommendations will vary annually depending on results, availability of funds, and competing priorities.