The Red Rose survey for 2015/16 is now closed and I would like to share some of the initial results with you. We had 118 responses across the mail and Facebook surveys. This equates to 1/3 of the club membership.
I was hoping for something over 25% so thanks very much to everyone who took the time to respond.
We wanted to run the survey for two reasons.
1) Although the club is growing, and we think we know why, we wanted some feedback from the club members to provide some evidence. The role of the committee is after all to ensure the club is successful and with the club having shrunk before, we want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
2) We wanted to know what we could do better. We believe that Red Rose is a great club but anything can be improved. So we wanted a way to solicit our members opinions and ideas. Not everyone can be, or wants to be on the committee but many people have ideas that can benefit all.
So the first part of the survey covers the multiple choice questions so we could get an idea why people join in the first place, how they find out about us and what they do when they are members.
The second part covers comments, feedback and ideas outside of the options we presented. We got 40 individual comments and suggestions which again, I’m so pleased by. Ticking a multi choice question box is one thing, but giving such thought to the questions is amazing.
Initially I put two surveys together with one for those not planning to renew, but we felt that anyone not wishing to renew would be less inclined to respond, so we merged the two surveys into the one you have seen.
Surveymonkey allows a free survey of 10 questions and up to 100 responses. We were always likely to get over 100, hence the separate mail and Facebook surveys. I have merged the results together manually to provide the stats below.
By far the highest number is the recommendation from a friend, but also significant is the number who saw us at other events. It shows how important it is to wear club clothing at races and I suspect that the attitude and mutual support at events influences members as well.
I am surprised that Facebook is so low. I assume the people who selected Internet found the Red Rose website. I’ll change the question to be a bit more specific next time.
Some predictable responses here, although I was surprised that health benefits was so high. Perhaps there is more that the club can do to support members health and indeed there were a few suggestions along these lines as well.
Unsurprisingly, the Red Rose races are by far the most attended but I think the key thing here is that all the regular club events are pretty well attended.
This is a key one for me. I thought that the social aspects would be up there but I am surprised that this is so much higher than the others.
Of course it is difficult to draw too much from a survey but I think the clear result of this (for me at least) so far is that members join for a number of reasons and I’m sure they would be the same for many clubs but the social aspects and friendliness are major contributors to people staying.
We intend to run the survey again next year and see if the trends change at all. I’m sure that you can hardly wait ☺.
So what happens now? The committee has already had an overview of the comments and suggestions and will be considering what to do about each of them now that the survey is closed and all the responses are in. This will take some time, after all, we only meet once a month and we mostly have day jobs. But you can expect some developments over the next few months. In any event, we’ll be posting stuff as soon as we can to keep you updated.
One of the results from your suggestions is actually this blog. We got a suggestion regarding submitting race results and although that isn’t the only purpose of the blog, the suggestion prompted the idea and i hope you all find it beneficial. As an aside, I also hope that the blog will give potential new members an idea what the club is about and influence them to give us a try.
So there you have it, for now at least.
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