A few thoughts on survey results

Gail Francis, 8/11/2011

There are a few things that stood out to me about the survey results and wanted to share a few thoughts. I realize that not all of this will have a place in the overarching evaluation and recommendations you are preparing, so just use whatever is helpful. There are a few things that I would love for us to get broken down a little more even if it isn’t part of your report because it would be helpful to some of the staff and leaders of the network. I will preface those with an asterisk.

Network Benefits at the Margins

One thing I noticed was that people from the Dakotas had a high response rate for the survey, and they also indicated that they gained a lot of new connections. In general, I don’t believe we see a lot of participation from the Dakota groups in the working groups or receiving very much funding from the GWSAF. They sometimes seem to live at the margins of RE-AMP (of course, that’s literally true from a geographic perspective). Yet, this indicates that they may be getting more value with less mutual investment than our members at large.

*Type of Work of Respondent and Organization

There were a number of questions where I thought it would be very helpful to know how answers break down according to whether someone is a grassroots organizer, policy wonk, communications staff, etc. I believe we asked them to identify themselves along these lines. Some of the questions that I thought would really be useful to have more breakdown were:

• Participation in survey as a whole
• Level of influence being appropriate (slide 29)
• Benefits of shared assets (slide 38)
• Satisfaction with state priorities (slide 44)
• Attendance at working groups

Working Groups

For those who indicated they never attend working groups, what do they do? How do they engage in RE-AMP?

Index of Engagement

For what it’s worth, the index of engagement would place me at the lowest level of engagement. I can’t think of anyone else that might fit this bill, possible some funders, but still it might be worth looking at that list of low-engagement people and see if there is any way to test the accuracy of that index.

*RE-AMP Successes

Did people talk about how RE-AMP helped them succeed in the items billed as a re-amp success? We want to do more of whatever that was!

Level of Satisfaction

This is really an index of “highly satisfied” people, as those are the only ones that get counted. If a person is “somewhat satisfied” in every regard, they are scored as a 0 in terms of their satisfaction, even though they might be fairly satisfied across the board.

Caucuses

24% of respondents believe the caucuses are important to RE-AMP

20% believe the caucuses are important to their own work

10% believe the caucuses are well-integrated into the working groups

I feel we really could use some ideas to help us get a handle on how to do better here. On a related note, it would be great to have some ideas about how to help our members develop the ongoing connections they need in general without spiraling out into endless conference calls. For example, the EE Working Group now has at least 3 subcommittees that function at a high and productive level. But facilitating that takes an enormous amount of the Working Group Leader and Associate’s time, and the member’s as well. This seems relevant to the issues of caucuses as well. If we think that separate calls are where they need to be, how can we also ask them to integrate into 5 different working groups?

Connections

I was really glad you asked this question. It was very interesting to see that it takes about 2 years before people really start to get the benefit of RE-AMP in this regard. Would love examples of how other networks have improved this process.

Ease of Information

On slide 27, when you show how people felt about ease of getting information, and then broke it out by those at the Level 0 of engagement felt, did that latter number include those who “somewhat agree” or only “strongly agree?”

Better Investment

There’s an interesting discrepancy between the number of funders who feel RE-AMP has led to better funding decisions, as opposed to the (still healthy) number of advocates.

*Prime Time Satisfaction

It was great to see the high level of satisfaction here. I think we tend to hear a lot more from those who aren’t satisfied than all those who are. Because the process varies a bit from state to state, it might be very helpful to see how this breaks out by state so that we can try to carry over best practices from one place to another.

*Best Practices, Gaps, etc.

You asked what types of things they want more of from the network, and quite a few said they wanted more info on best practices and on gaps in their own organizations. My own experience in trying to provide this has not been overly useful. For example, when I wrote a report about an extensive effort to pass a series of energy policies in Wisconsin, I pulled out lessons that I thought could be useful elsewhere in the network. I billed the report as something that was for the entire network, however, very few people even downloaded it to read it because they said, “well our situation is different than Wisconsin, so I don’t think it would apply,”  or they said, “We are working on different policies than were included in that bill, so it isn’t relevant.” Moreover, when people did read it, they almost always agreed that it was in fact relevant to their work, but I rarely saw any example of that actually resulting in a change in their organization’s practices. This was often because the person who saw the value was not the person who drives the organizational culture. This is just one example which I present as a way of saying that if anyone presented ideas about how they would envision finding best practices and using them to change their own work, it would be very helpful to me. Likewise, if your previous experience with networks provides guidance on this, it would be highly valuable.

 Using Your Slides

Would it be possible to get the ppt version of these slides? I would love to be able to pull out several of them for targeted use, such as on staff calls, or one on one with a couple working group leaders.