Survey Findings and Reflections

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August 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been engaged in a series of surveys and data collection.  Many of you received emails with survey links from Rayna and myself, and some of you heard from us by phone.   We put together surveys around membership benefits and the NESEA website, because we’re in the process of re-evaluating both aspects of NESEA.  It was great to get so much feedback from all of you who participated.  We got a wide range of responses, some passionate, some encouraging, and some candid critiques, and on behalf of Rayna and I, thank you for your input.

With regards to membership, we really wanted to know how you valued your membership with NESEA and what you thought could be done to improve it. Some of the “big picture” questions we asked were:  Why NESEA? What do you like most about membership? What can we improve? On the website survey, we wanted to learn how you use the web and more importantly, how you interact with NESEA online through our website. We asked:  What do you like about the site? What purpose does it serve for you? What would you want to improve?

So, what did we learn?

Membership

What sets NESEA apart as an organization are the members themselves. Many of you are members of other professional organizations, but you joined NESEA (or stayed with NESEA) because of the community – specifically the opportunity to learn from your peers.
You greatly value the learning and information you get from other NESEA members and NESEA programs, and would like to see more opportunity to interact with each other and our conference content. Interestingly enough, many of you wanted more of ‘x’ and less of ‘y’, but ‘x’ and ‘y’ were not the same across the board. We see this as an opportunity (and a challenge) to really make the connections between disciplines loud and clear, and to really show the whole system in action. Keep telling us what content excites you most!
We received a lot of valuable constructive feedback as well. Some of your criticisms were specific  (too wordy in our communications) and others were broader (our thinking and programming is too mainstream/conventional). You also gave us a lot of positive information. 82% of respondents said that they would recommend NESEA to a friend, and 86% of respondents felt that NESEA had met their expectations. Suffice to say, we hear you,  you’ve asked us to do better, and we will be doing our best to deliver.

Website

Based upon our survey results, it would seem that most NESEA members are well connected and well adapted to a 21st century lifestyle.  You told us that used the web for three primary areas: research, reference and networking.  Most of you supplemented your reading material with web content,  including looking for information on the NESEA site or referring someone to the page. You also indicated that you were a connected group; 61% of you said you were involved in some form of social networking platform, with most favoring Facebook or LinkedIn.  In holding with your interest in information and connection, 53% of you said you’d interacted with NESEA’s online postings.

With regards to the website, you provided lots of varied but valuable feed back on the site. Most of you liked the content and color scheme of the website.  Your most consistent criticisms were the need for a search feature on the site, a newsfeed for NESEA updates, and a change in the overall site layout.  This tells us that you like what we’re doing, but we need to make it more accessible and attractive for you.

Personally, I find all the feedback we received to be very exciting. It’s great to see such parallels in the surveys despite asking different questions. Both surveys revealed that you, as NESEA members, value learning and networking opportunities, and that you regularly use the internet to do this. This presents a fantastic opportunity for NESEA as we move forward; using this information we can tailor our membership benefits to provide educational and networking opportunities, and we can utilize our growing web presence to facilitate this process, to better advance the cause of sustainable building.  But you don’t have to wait for a web site redesign to interact with us – you can tap into the online community now! You can Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to and comment on this blog.  There are so many ways to be a part of the conversation to support your interests, bolster your community and ensure that your NESEA experience is top-notch.

Filed Under: Communications, Industry, NESEA, Sustainable Building

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