WMUK membership survey 2013

Introduction

Its that time again! We would like to draft the survey rationale and questions in the next two weeks and distribute it over the following two week period at the beginning of November.

There have been lots of inroads and equally lots of holdups in progressing membership sign up since the last survey in October 2012. We have carried forward some of the implications of the last survey such as a monthly members newsletter, volunteer handout, a workshop to discuss recruitment ideas at the AGM resulting in ideas about how to promote membership.
Still clearly lacking are a good online sign up experience, the possibly to renew annually via direct debit, a good induction process, and more thought through 'workshops' on membership and governance delivered via the VLE or in-person sessions.

I would like this survey to improve significantly on the 2012 version by asking tighter questions, having a good and clear justification for the data collected and stored, and balancing a need for quantitative figures we can measure changing over time against an opportunity for respondents to provide nuanced feedback. Katherine Bavage (WMUK) (talk) 14:50, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Ideas

How to administer

The charity currently has a Gold Survey Monkey subscription. I want this survey to reflect what members think. In 2012 this created a problem - we wanted to be sure that only members could fill it out so rather than allow anonymous answers we made all answers opt in to verified respondents. This can be problematic - first of all because we may want to ask questions about age/gender/sexuality/ethnicity which are protected characteristics, and so we have extra-heightened obligations in terms of viewing or storing those responses. Secondly because we don't want to discourage people from being frank by disallowing them anonymity.

We can collect the user info anonymously via a weblink (details here) but only provide that link directly to members via email. It could of course be forwarded to non members who could game responses :(

Alternatively we could split the survey - we could have a non-anonymous 'opinion' led feedback section asking questions about engagement, contact, issues, member benefits etc and then an anonymous follow up section with demographic data including any protected characteristics.

I will say now that I'm being cautious as this issue and these questions were contentious in 2012 and I'd like to avoid making the same mistakes. Please share your thoughts! Katherine Bavage (WMUK) (talk) 14:50, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Two separate surveys for members over and under a year?

To get an idea about whether our joining processes are effecting any change, is it a good idea to survey new members differently? We could send an effectively identical survey out to members who had joined over a year ago, and joined less than a year ago, to see whether the 'new' members start to show different levels of engagement around hopefully increasingly more joined up recruitment and inductions? Katherine Bavage (WMUK) (talk) 14:50, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Stuff we may want to ask about!

• Membership/Promoting
• Microgrants/Applications
• AGM and EGM attendance
• Numbers/recruitment
• Meetups
  • Where do you want them? Options for answering:
    • List of cities/towns - could be a big list so split by region?
    • Write in list of locations - would need someone with basic geographical knowledge to interpret. That wont help if someone just says Newport though.
    • How far from home (time and/or distance) but we don't know where home is.
  • When do you want them - day of week/time of day. Again tied to location - no point having a Monday afternoon meetup in Truro if the folks who want it are in Morpeth. Thryduulf (talk: local | en.wp | en.wikt) 15:33, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
• Language.

It would be interesting to know how much volunteer time people have. Richard Symonds (WMUK) (talk) 16:13, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Newsletter survey

I don't think it's a bad idea to check if people are receiving the newsletter but I'd rather we actually run a separate survey all about the newspaper by the end of the year, via the December edition which will be the 12th. Thoughts? Katherine Bavage (WMUK) (talk) 14:57, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

The survey/surveys

Lets draft the questions together! And data protection notices and everything! Hurrah Katherine Bavage (WMUK) (talk) 14:50, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Link - WMUK_membership_survey_2013/Survey_draft

Comments about demographics questions

I've put the demographics questions in the same order as last year, but taken the questions from m:Survey best practices (as not doing that seems silly). I'm wondering though about whether age should come first - gender and then sexual orientation to me seems perhaps a little personal to be asking right off the bat? What does anyone else think? Thryduulf (talk: local | en.wp | en.wikt) 16:33, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Using the education levels from the Meta page results in significantly coarser-grained information than last year, and it is arranged in the opposite order. Are either of these things problems? Thryduulf (talk: local | en.wp | en.wikt) 16:40, 14 October 2013 (UTC)