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Post by SSO JOAT on Nov 21, 2014 0:56:00 GMT -9
The member survey is now live and will be available through midnight on Friday, November 28, 2014. That's just one week for you to provide the GeocacheAlaska! Board of Directors with your input on what our organization should be doing. There is a short section of the survey for each of our active committees. And the survey has lots of open entry boxes for you to be as detailed as you want in your feedback. You do not have to answer every question or type a bunch of stuff if you don't want to. Remember that this survey is intended to give member feedback directly to the Board of Directors and in an anonymous fashion. Your identity will be separated from the questions in the final reports provided to the Board and back to our membership in a summary article in the January 2015 Newsletter. We will randomly select four (4) people who complete the survey in a drawing for a set of GeocacheAlaska! pathtags. There is one set of 2014 and three sets of 2013 pathtags that will be given to four randomly selected members. You must complete the survey and enter your GC name on the last page of the survey to get your name in the hat for this drawing. Winners will be announced NLT November 30 on this thread and via our Facebook feeds. You may enter our survey via the following link: www.surveymonkey.com/s/GCAK2014MemberSurveyThank you for participating in this survey! On behalf of the GeocacheAlaska! Board of Directors
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Post by akgh519 on Nov 22, 2014 15:11:00 GMT -9
Question: How can the survey be anonymous from the board when a board member is running the survey?
Not sure the way things are being presented are quite accurate.
Makes no difference to me cause I will own up to any comments I make. In fact most would be repetition...
I only say something because I would bet others could be thinking the same...
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
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Post by SSO JOAT on Nov 22, 2014 19:42:54 GMT -9
The survey results are provided anonymously to the Board as a final report. The essay answers are pulled from the survey data as a list of responses with no ties to other responses or any names that the person entered (such as volunteering for committee work). It's just a block of text reponses.
Yes, it is possible for someone with access to the Survey Monkey account to go into the survey data and align responses with names. It takes extra work to do that. Those of us with the password to the SM account have stated that we are not going to view the data that way and the personal opinion of each of us involved in the member surveys is that we don't care to know the link between who said what. It is the overall responses that matter, not who said them. The formal report provided to the board will not have a single member name on it.
The data from the survey is displayed to an administrator as a list of answers associated with a question. So, for a multiple choice question, we see the question and then we see a graph showing the number of answers per choice. It doesn't say who answered which way, just the total counts.
For a text-based answer (essay type), I see the question and then I see a list with the text from the actual responses. It doesn't indicate in any way who entered which text answer. It's just a list of text answers, one right after another. This is how the data will be pulled and provided to the Board.
The answers that call for people to enter their contact info or at the end to enter their GC name for validation also display as a list of text that was entered. It does not show me the link between those names and what answers they provided, unless I go into the actual respondent data and specifically extract the full results of a single respondent. We are not going to do that, unless there is a specific justification to do so (which would be brought before the President prior to such an action).
So, to validate all the entries, I look at the answers to the second to last question asking for GC user name. I don't see the rest of the survey, just a list of names. I go down that list and verify that each of them are on our membership roster. Anyone who is not a member, or anyone who provides a false name, is "flagged". I can then extract their entire survey responses to a separate pile. Every single response will be provided to the Board, but these flagged responses will be noted as such and the Board can weigh those responses at whatever value they see fit. The remaining responses will be from validated members and the questions with personal identifiers will be separated from the rest of the data.
After all that, it is absolutely, positively impossible for the Board or anyone else reading the report to know who provided what responses. And that is the definition of anonymous. If there is anyone who doesn't trust me to be able to provide a complete and anonymous report to the Board from this survey, then they should step up and provide a real, workable, alternative solution.
The Board has sponsored this survey, is fully informed on the process involved, and has placed their trust in me to provide them with an anonymous report at the conclusion. We have used the exact same method for each survey we've conducted over the last few years, plus each Board election, plus each photo or pathtag contest vote. It's never been an issue before and I give my word that such trust is well placed. It shouldn't take any more than that.
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Post by ladybugkids on Nov 22, 2014 20:43:06 GMT -9
Having coordinated the Surveys as Webmaster before Scott assumed the role, I can attest that the process Scott describes is accurate. It takes extra steps to view who provided which responses, effort that's generally not warranted when one is already busy with many other irons in the fire.
Downloading only the results to share with the Board or publish in the newsletter is done using one of SurveyMonkey's ready-made reports.
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Post by akgh519 on Nov 23, 2014 9:59:31 GMT -9
Thanks for explaining the process!
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Post by TheFirefly on Nov 24, 2014 20:16:03 GMT -9
Thanks for asking the question, Ray! The thought had occurred to me, too, though I hadn't mentioned it. (I hadn't wondered because I distrust anyone involved, just because I wondered how it could be truly anonymous from a technical standpoint.) Thanks, Scott and Mike, for the detailed explanation.
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Post by SSO JOAT on Nov 24, 2014 21:07:37 GMT -9
From a "technical" standpoint, the only way to have a truly anonymous survey is to hire a 3rd party firm to conduct the survey on our behalf. The expense is beyond what our little recreational hobby club deems appropriate to collect some basic feedback from the membership to help guide the Board on prioritizing our limited resources in 2015. The methodolody we use, including any risk of a person with the password viewing the data before filtering, is a risk that the Board is fully aware of and has vetted as appropriate.
Another alternative would be to completely eliminate all the questions that ask for personal information. This would have us trusting the internet world that no one takes the survey more than once or that people who are not members of our organization are not spoofing our survey with a bunch of bad data from outside our club. We only want feedback from club members, so we need to have a means of validating the responses. Asking for a GC nickname at the end, where we can just drop the responses to that question from the final survey report, is the simplest means of doing so. In fact, when the final report is generated, each of the questions that ask for volunteers for committees and such will be pulled out separately into one pile of data for each of the questions. In other words, there will be a pile of responses for each committee volunteer pool that will be standing on it's own. If someone one enters an answer like "see my last response" or similar, it will not make any sense to the readers as there is no way for them to know what that individual's last response was. Each question must be answered as a stand alone answer due to the lack of a link between questions and responders.
Anyway, we have logged some 76 responses so far, which is great. The last time we ran this member survey we only had 42 people respond. The year before that was only 27. I'm hopeful that we have some good feedback, including some good critical feedback, that can by laid before the Board and our Board will take appropriate action to address our member's concerns and get things on track.
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Post by ladybugkids on Nov 25, 2014 15:50:31 GMT -9
Folks can also e-mail GeocacheAlaska! President Wes Skinner with comments at president@geocachealaska.org.
Still not anonymous (nor would a standalone mailbox that someone would have to pull e-mails from), but another avenue for providing opinions.
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Post by NorthWes on Nov 26, 2014 10:07:51 GMT -9
Folks can also e-mail GeocacheAlaska! President Wes Skinner with comments at president@geocachealaska.org. Still not anonymous (nor would a standalone mailbox that someone would have to pull e-mails from), but another avenue for providing opinions. I'm always ready and willing to hear feedback from members about anything at all - use that email address above and I'll be prompt in reply. Wes
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Post by SSO JOAT on Nov 30, 2014 0:53:12 GMT -9
Survey closed yesterday with 100 people taking it. Three of those were non-members and disqualified, 11 of them were Cheechako members and 86 of them were Sourdough members.
I personally generated the full report from our survey generation site (Survey Monkey) and removed the sections with personal ID from the main report. I then redacted date/time stamping information from the open-ended responses in order to ensure the final report to the Board was completely anonymous. This report has been delivered to the entire sitting Board as well as the 2 Board elect members for review.
The Board has advised me that due to the record length of the survey and the shear volume of open-ended responses that were supplied by our members, it will be the February (and possibly March) newsletter before a Board summary and response to the survey will be available.
Of the 86 members who finished the entire survey and left a valid member name at the end, we conducted a drawing by placing all the names printed on strips of paper into a Geocaching.com hat. The first name drawn for a 2014 pathtag set was Barnacle9. The next 3 names were drawn for a 2013 pathtag set: biggriz, Long Hunter, and *skadi*. Congratulations all! We will have your prizes in the mail shortly.
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