Surveys are one of the Improve Group’s most frequently used evaluation tools, and for good reason they are great way to get feedback from a large group of people. Surveys are generally quite a cost-effective strategy, because after the initial design and launching of your survey, there’s usually minimal added cost for each survey response you receive. Additionally, surveys are so commonly used that most people are pretty comfortable sharing their insights through a survey administered online, on paper or on the phone.
Of course, surveys also have their limitations. It can be difficult to gather many detailed questions through a survey. If you don’t understand what the respondent meant in a particular response, you can’t immediately follow up with more questions for clarification. In two current projects, we’ve used a two-step data collection strategy that addresses some of these concerns and results in rich qualitative and quantitative data.
We’re currently working with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to evaluate the Any Given Child program. So far, seven communities have participated in this innovative program aimed at providing all K-8 students with equitable access to arts education. Selected communities convene a Community Arts Team (CAT), made up of 20 to 30 representatives from school districts, arts organizations, local government and philanthropy. Over the course of a year, the CAT creates a strategic plan that uses existing resources to provide an equitable arts education for the community’s K-8 grade students. As part of our evaluation of the program, we are administering in-depth surveys to CAT members to learn about the impact of the initiative, program strengths and opportunities for improvement. After compiling community-specific survey findings, we share these findings with three to five leaders on the CAT team and facilitate a discussion about the context and implications of survey findings. This process has resulted in rich quantitative and qualitative data that reflects the feedback of all CAT members, and provides additional insights about the evaluation questions through the leaders’ review and discussion of data.
In another current project, our team is administering the Nonprofit Employment Trends SurveyTM for Nonprofit HR Solutions, the nation's only full-service consulting firm dedicated exclusively to meeting the human resources needs of nonprofit organizations. Since 2007, Nonprofit HR Solutions has administered annual surveys to gauge trends in nonprofit organizations’ staffing and HR practices, including projected growth, recruitment strategies, budgeting, staffing challenges and staffing resource management. Through our partnership for the 2012 survey, we added a new component to the Trends Survey. After the survey closed and results were analyzed, we identified key trends that we’d like to explore more in-depth through an interview process. After selecting the top three issues to focus on based on this year’s survey results (retention, turnover and diversity), we interviewed a sample of HR leaders about their experiences in those areas. Findings from interviews complement the Trends Survey data, as they help “tell the story” of the key trends in HR Managers’ own words.
