Community Survey Recruiting Ideas - Hosted by Linda Becker
At the PRI meeting on Thursday we heard some great ideas about how to improve recruiting. Here are those suggestions. If you have more, please add a comment (you will need to log in to do that). ALSO, if you want more details about a specific strategy, mention that. Either the person who generated the idea can answer, or I will get in touch with them to find out more.
Ideas collected so far:
Toward the end of the meeting Colleen from Skamania wrote in these ideas: "Just a few ideas that helped--I am also the Regional school nurse for the area so I have access to the school website as well as county website. This allowed me to e-mail many. The chief sent out the survey to the county, which really helped. I attended a winter athlete parent meeting & had parents fill out survey by hand. We also had connection to a Skamania lodge employee meeting (which is one of the biggest employers of the area). Our faith sector sent out the survey to his members as well."
Nancy Fiander from White Swan wrote: "Our faith based partners are having their folks fill out the survey during Sunday services."
Allison Johnston (Island County) wrote: "The program manager of Island County Recovery Services is going to implement the paper version at their support group meetings."
Kristi Sharpe (Clarkston) wrote earlier: "Clarkston is getting ready to send out our Community Survey's with the Public Utilities billing service on Dec. 31st. Most will receive a hard copy with the option to use Survey Monkey, and those that pay on-line, will only get the Survey Monkey option."
Carolyn Pence, Moses Lake has several strategies going: "My school district superintendent has also offered to email out the survey link to the middle school and high school parents in the Moses Lake School district." ALSO: One of my coalition members, who is the Director of our local Boys and Girls Club, has posted the survey on the B&G Club Facebook website, asking parents to take time to complete the survey regarding these important issues. And another ALSO: It is also posted on the Columbia Basin Herald’s website – first page of the “paper” – Take a Survey. I took it this morning – quick and painless."
I am trying to make sure I get the survey out to enough people without children. How do I find out find out how many people who took the survey so far that do not have children?
I can run an analysis to see how many people by each age group report that they have children. Let me know if you need that report.
Can I still add surveys to Survey Monkey the first week of February?
If you have more surveys to enter at the beginning of February, please let me know. I will be building the individual community reports in early February, but if I don't have all of your entries, I will wait. BUT PLEASE ENTER YOUR SURVEYS RIGHT AWAY. I need to load all of the community surveys into an analytic database for the statewide report...
Thank you for posting this Linda! It should be very helpful. My question is, how do I monitor the number of survey's being submitted via Survey Monkey?
Thank you!
Kristi Sharpe
At this point, Kristi, you have to ask me (linda.becker@dshs.wa.gov) or your system administrator. The Survey Monkey is a DBHR site license and only DBHR staff have access to it...
Idea: We made a list of all school events in December and January so coalition members could sign up to attend and hand out surveys and links to the online survey for those that would rather do it that way. We attended one parent event at a middle school and had 35 survey's returned! It's a bit more of a challenge at open events, such as basketball games and concerts. People would rather take the link, but I do not think we are getting results from that. We have toyed with having a computer available for them to fill the survey out, but have not tried that yet. The challenge is that only one person at a time could use the computer.
Carolyn Pence:
One that I need to take away - the superintendent found out she couldn't email out to all parents due to district policy; however, she did email to all school district staff the survey monkey link.
After reviewing our results to date, we looked at the demographics we are missing and discussed them during a planning session. Now we have: (1) a college professor circulating the link at the local community college to staff and students over 18; (2) a link to the faith based communities contacting several of the larger churches to see if the link can be put on their websites and promoted in their weekly bulletins; (3) high school key club members visiting the local senior center and helping them to complete the surveys by hand - what a great discussion opportunity here. We will also have a computer at our local chamber's Business Expo and have people complete the survey online - and if they do, they get a coalition reusable shopping bag.
I really like your using of the college professor!
Testing reply notifications.
Hi Carolyn,
We are trying to get into Church Bulletins also, but I didn't think about using key club members to visit the senior center. They could help with some of our other locations also, possibly.
This is not really about recruiting, but is indirectly related.
I ran a couple of cross tabs on the whole dataset---that is, all of the surveys without regard to which PRI community they came from. One was querying whether or not people who had children 18 or under had different attitudes, and the other was attitudes by age group. I think these are interesting and I will attach them here...
This list of recruiting and implementation ideas just came from Mike in Seattle:
We are providing a gift card incentive which helps a lot and we felt was needed given the length of the survey and the short timeline. We have hired some community members we have worked with in the past with connections to parents in various ethnic groups and they are doing the survey interview style for Somali, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Amharic, and Mien speaking parents. They have gone to food banks, while people are waiting in line, grocery stores, hair and nail salons and to community events where there will be parents as well as church and mosque events. We are hoping to have a table at the local boys and girls club when parents come to pick up kids. And go to indoor youth sports league games and practices to get parents while they are waiting. Some of our coalition members and partner agencies are helping reach parents as well. We will also be going to the ptsa at local schools. We went to public housing offices during the first week of Jan. When people have to go in person to pay their rent and had a table set up. For the rest of January we will focus more on reaching parents at Aki Kurose Middle School.
We have received positive comments from our interviewers and we have quite a few people that included contact info on a separate page to receive more information.
Wow. Great idea to hire some people to help with this project. I might think about that for next year. It's hard to get busy coalition members to go to all of the school events we have, let a one churches and other meetings. I have a friend a the local food bank. I'll see about covering that one
I like the idea of incentives for the survey, however, as we talked about it, we couldn't think of a way to make if fair, since a lot of our surveys will be done electronically. We will think more about this next year, but if anyone has ideas, let me know. Thanks.
Here are a few more ideas on getting the word out. We'll see how it goes.
Our local police department has put the survey monkey link on their website and their Facebook page. Also, our clinicians will be asking clients in their treatment groups if they would be willing to complete surveys as well. A small incentive - we know chocolate works - will be provided upon completion.
Also, we have coalition members who have taken the surveys to the private schools as well.
And finally, since we cannot send out the link via the school district system due to their electronics policy, when I worked with Key Club earlier this week, I took surveys and slips of paper with the survey monkey link and my contact information and due date on them. As an incentive there, the Key Club advisor said that he would give each student a 1/2 hr credit towards their service hours for turning in their parents' surveys.
Several local businesses have taken copies to distribute to their clientele as well.
For the pencil and paper versions, I has asked them to be turned in by January 25 so we have time to input them into the computer. Again, using myself and a Key Club member or two to do that. They get the hours and the info gets into the system.
This idea came from a Coalition member. Our local library has a lot of people come in to use the computers. Since they are a public entity, they cannot promote the survey, but they allowed us to put up a poster on their board and leave a announcements about the survey and the link (Spanish and English), so people can access it if they would like to.