At our June council meeting in Ottawa councillors did a short exercise to take a "State of the Party" snapshot. Each councillor was able to rank from 1 to 10 (where 1 is bad, and 10 is good) how they thought the party was doing in 16 different broad areas. The idea was to do a sort of poll where the results that would help to indicate where the current council thought we were doing well, and where we thought improvements were needed. 

If this poll was conducted by the new council on a regular basis then I think it will help the party to analyze how we are doing over time. I think it would also be useful to regularly poll members with the same questions. Low polling results by all groups would indicate obvious problems. Discrepancies in the results would indicate other possible problems. For example, if council thought we were doing well in an area and members thought we were poorly than it might indicate something to look into.  In addition, I think this information will be valuable when it comes to our strategic planning efforts.

Councillors weren't asked to provide written input but certainly that would be another useful exercise for both councillors and members. Mike Nickerson did something like this in Ontario and I thought the results were useful and interesting. But again, the advantage of the "snapshot" view is that the responses can be given quickly and the results can help to provide a high-level overview at a glance.