City Pays-to-Play for Ego Boost, Taxpayers Lose
When the City of San Antonio announced that it had made the Forbes 2023 list of “America’s Best-In-State Employers in Texas”, its news release said the “prestigious award is presented by Forbes and Statista Inc.”
However, most San Antonio residents are unaware that these types of “best-in-state” awards are merely a vehicle for Statista to generate revenue, a practice noted as “pay to play runs wild.”
InfuseSA filed an open records request with the city that asked for all payments made to Forbes and Statista, as well as copies of surveys received by city employees from the latter. After a 3-month wait, the city released 516 pages of records.
Included were emails between city staff and Statista, as well as licensing fees that grant award recipients “bragging rights.”
Our investigation further uncovered that award recipients are selected when Forbes and Statista “measure up the leading employers around the country and the world by asking those in the best position to say: the workers.”
Statista, a German data-gathering platform, promotes itself as “the market leader in providing reliable market, company and consumer data.” But emails with city employees dispute the reliability of the data on which they and Forbes selected the city as an award recipient.
On August 24, 2022, Matthew Struble, Senior Project Manager for Statista, emailed David Gonzalez, Vice President of Media Relations & Communications at Visit San Antonio, a 501(c)6 organization “that serves as the sales and marketing arm of San Antonio as a leading leisure and meeting destination.”
Mr. Struble states he is “reaching out on behalf of Forbes and Statista to notify you that City of San Antonio has been recognized by Forbes as one of America’s Best-in-State Employers 2022. Congratulations on the recognition!”
However, in order for the city to “leverage this earned recognition” and receive a “special award logo, available only to winners,” Mr. Struble advises that the city must purchase a “licensing package.” This would give it the right to promote the award “in print and digital marketing materials.”
Mr. Struble’s email indicates this “recognition was created through a survey of 70,000 U.S. employees across 25 industry sectors.” Forbes also states these employee surveys are anonymous.
In a May 23, 2023 email exchange, Roxanne Olivarri, a manager in the city’s Human Resource department, asked Mr. Struble “can you remind me how individuals are contacted and invited to take the survey?”
Mr. Struble responds vaguely that “[i]t sometimes varies based on the project, but that majority of our projects have an online access panel (provided by a survey panel provider: Cint is one we’ve used many times). Individuals sign up for the panels in order to receive reward points, gift cards, etc.”
It appears there was no push back from the city for more details. Notably missing from the records the city provided to InfuseSA is how anonymous survey participants, most likely motivated by the promise of gift cards, are verified to be actual city employees.
Further calling into the question the methodology and accuracy of the data Statista used to select award winners is an August 22, 2023 email.
Ms. Olivarri notifies Statista Senior Project Manager Joseph Doubleday that Forbes’ live listing of award recipients states Alice Aguirre is CEO of the city. However, the city does not have a CEO nor does it have a senior city leader named Alice Aguirre.
In 2022, despite these red flags, the city entered into a $17,000 licensing agreement with Statista. In 2023, $18,000 was paid for the same. This may seem like small beans in a multi-billion-dollar budget, but they add up.
And the more of these there are, the more emboldened the city is to dish out bigger chunks of taxpayer-funded largesse.
If the city feels it needs another artificial ego boost and “prestigious award” in 2024, we suggest flying senior leaders to a Nevada brothel where service workers can declare the city to be the “best of the best” at far less cost to taxpayers than Statista charges.