2021 Membership Survey Results

[Erin al'Denael]

First, many apologies for the delay in getting this information out. The information below was compiled by @Mieriana Souvra, and tweaked with suggestions from @Serinia Edoras. This thread will be locked, but you are welcome to discuss it in the Community Feedback forum.

Cheers,

Erin

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A big thank you to those who filled out the Membership Survey!

76 people filled it out, and about 33 people filled out the whole thing. This is about 22% of the active community. We have 332 members who have been active in some way over the past few months, so the 76 number is a statistically significant sample of active membership with a 10% margin of error, and the 33 people is statistically significant with a 15% margin of error.

For those of you unfamiliar with statistics, this is a measure of how likely these responses are to represent the feelings of our active members. The margin of error number is what percent of our full population may deviate from the overall responses we received.

Overall Insights

• Majority of respondents > 35 years of age (56 of the 76 respondents)
  
• Overall satisfaction with the site is pretty good (53 of the 76 respondents rated satisfaction at 4 or 5)
  
• Interest in bringing back the Guilds in some way: 47% in favor, 32% not, others had additional ideas
• How people prefer to engage with Admin = through their Membership Admin & Email
  • Based on these results we believe we should resume only posting the Exec Feedback forum quarterly after these meetings. This should utilize it more intentionally and help bring attention to it when it’s most helpful.
• Admin responsiveness: 54% positive, 25% neutral, 21% negative
  
• Application process is clear for jobs
• Not having enough free or personal time is what prevents most members from participating (posting, applying for jobs, engaging in events)
• The largest theme of comments of unsatisfied participants was that we have a culture of toxicity and drama. Members are afraid to post for fear of offending someone and are tired of anger and other members assuming negative intent.
  • We will continue to address this through cross-group activities and Mediation

Department Specific Insights
Most department-specific survey results have ~35 respondents or so. This is a relatively small sample size but is statistically significant with about a 15% margin of error.

Community Outreach:

1. There is interest in utilizing Discord for future freeweek events
2. The majority consider philanthropy important to their membership, but interest is pretty split
3. Interest in Freeweeks is pretty split, but the majority do enjoy them.
4. A little more than half of members enjoy Virtual Events, with the most popular being Discord events/trivia, and movie nights.

Events:

1. For Logos, there is interest in member choice, but we don't receive many submissions. We need to be cautious of over-using the Graphics Development team, as logo creation takes so much effort. We need to find a way to encourage more member submissions.
2. Lowest level of interest continues to be Fall Ball/Spring Fling, which reinforces our decision to move Anni away from JordanCon. We traditionally have an influx of members after JordanCon - if we can hold Spring Fling shortly after in May, we may be able to get more interest, if people are looking for more in-person events.
3. There is currently no support for events in the South Pacific.

Marketing:

1. Discord and Facebook lead the way as preferred social media channels
2. No current interest in TikTok, but this might reflect our older membership population and/or might represent an opportunity to engage new/younger members. There is work going on in this space but there is also a constraint on the amount of support/applications we receive for this work.
3. Posts and content about TarValon.Net drives more interest, slightly over books, show, etc., which is great as it is unique/owned content.

Membership:

1. Some Junior Members are losing contact with their Mentors and there may be an opportunity to provide more guidance/training/expectations to Mentors on level/practice of engagement, though the survey may misrepresent needs/expectations because many of the members who filled this out were Junior Members a long time ago.
2. Good support for the Mediation program.

Research & Records:

1. Finding information in the Library is a challenge - This is a known issue, and we are working to make it easier.
2. Members are most interested in Classes on real life topics, with a class & discussion format
3. Majority of members feel merits are the right level of difficulty to attain.
4. There is support for adding more merits or replacing some old ones.

Technology:

1. Terrific support for using Discord
2. Feelings on whether we have the right number of channels or too many are pretty close, but the majority is that it's just right.
3. Members visit TarValon pretty equally on Desktop & Mobile.

If you would like to dive in and see the charts, they are located here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C7ZZvCSPeWzGgyLgZCVSmZVDCNyYTaNv4geeL2760uQ/edit?usp=sharing

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Please discuss this in the Community Feedback forum. If you would like to share thoughts on this, but have chosen to not opt into that forum, you are welcome to utilize the anonymous Suggestion Box, email me or the other Execs.