A non-cringey survey that helps coalitions understand themselves

Today, I’m going to talk about surveys.

Does that make you cringe?

I understand if it does. Surveys get a bad rap.

We’re often trying to get participants in a program or members of a community to take a survey, and - often - we don’t provide enough context for them to buy into the value of the information they’re sharing or for them to believe any changes will result from their input. To be fair, and to make matters worse, oftentimes there aren’t changes made as a result of survey responses.

There is a time and place for participant/community surveys, we certainly use them in our work here at PoP Health, and we have some thoughts on how to make them less painful and more impactful - more to come on that in a later newsletter.

But today, I’m here to talk about a kind of survey that doesn’t have quite as many potential pitfalls. A non-cringey survey, if you will.

This is a survey that coalitions and collaboratives can use to reflect on themselves. For lack of a better name, we call them partnership surveys.

These surveys are solely for members of the coalition, and the results help coalition members understand who they are and what they bring to the table, where they already have a lot of energy and expertise to move things forward, and where they may have gaps that need to be filled.

As per the latest guidance from the National Association of City and County Health Officials (NACCHO)’s, by way of their Mobilizing Action through Planning and Partnerships 2.0 process, local health departments are encouraged to begin their community health improvement assessment process with exactly this kind of survey (they call it a Community Partners Assessment).

I mentioned this briefly in the last issue of Community Threads, but we used this kind of survey in advance of our kick-off meeting with the Perry County Health Coalition in Pennsylvania earlier this month. At the meeting, we shared the survey results - which painted a picture of:

• Top action planning priorities;

• What members hope to accomplish via participation in the coalition;

• Current coalition composition, sectors and topics represented, populations touched by coalition member organizations, and suggestions around organizations, individuals, and communities to engage (either directly as coalition members or at other levels of engagement);

• Alignment between member organization focus areas and focus areas identified in the 2022 health assessment the coalition completed;

• Current and desired levels of engagement in the coalition;

• Activities and tasks members are most interested in supporting;

• Desired meeting format, frequency, and scheduling.

As you can imagine, by gathering this information ahead of the meeting and then sharing the synthesized responses and drawing out the key takeaways, we were able to facilitate a much more meaningful, nuanced discussion about where to go from here.

And since we were only surveying members of the coalition - who were already bought into the work of the coalition and wanted to actively use the results to inform their work - this survey rated pretty high on the non-cringey scale.

Have I convinced you that partnership surveys are non-cringey? Feel free to disagree with me (or share other examples of non-cringey surveys!) - drop me a line!

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