MakeICT Member Moving Survey

Hello Makers - our new building committee has been busy! Some of you have been involved in our building searches and discussions so we’d like to take the pulse of how you are feeling about a potential move. Please take a moment to fill out this survey:

https://goo.gl/forms/sCFXQrheoo4Xc6sz2

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Did it took less than 5 minutes.

I did it!

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How long will the survey be available and will we share the results at the quarterly meeting?

Done

131 responses so far, thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to respond we truly appreciate it.

My suggestion is to turn off the survey by Thanksgiving. Yes, we will share results. The new building committee also intends to use some of the results to help establish weighting for our building decision matrix we’re compiling. I hope we can have all that compiled and summarized by the December quarterly meeting so it can be shared with the membership.

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Thanks, @Jens

Were currently at 147 responses

Thanks to all who filled out the survey. It will help us make decisions related to finding a new building that are in line with our membership’s desires. Here is a high level summary of responses to the survey.

In response to the question related to increasing dues with a move to a larger location, the majority responded in favor of a dues increase, with 60.5% in favor of paying $35/month, 5.4% in favor of paying $50 per month, and the remaining 34% desiring to keep dues unchanged. As a reminder, the new building committee’s current recommendation is that if a dues increase is required for a new location, existing members would be grandfathered for 12 months at the current rate and a scholarship program be made available to those who cannot afford the higher cost. That said, if you are in favor of the dues increase and are able to start paying more now, you can sign up at the $35/month rate now to begin contributing to the new building fund.

The next question was related to our members’ preferred location of the makerspace in Wichita. We received the following responses, which will be used to help rank the locations of potential new locations against each other, with downtown, DDD, and Delano getting a higher rank than locations on the outskirts of town.

Downtown DDD Delano N Central S Central E Central W Central E W N S
Yes 91.2% 95.9% 79.6% 57.8% 54.4% 54.4% 46.3% 37.4% 31.3% 31.3% 36.7%
Maybe 5.4% 3.4% 16.3% 31.3% 27.9% 27.9% 27.9% 21.1% 23.1% 33.3% 22.4%
No 3.4% 0.7% 4.1% 10.9% 17.7% 17.7% 25.9% 41.5% 45.6% 35.4% 40.8%

The final general new building question was meant to find the importance to respondents that we find a new home in 2019 as this was a priority set forth to the board at the last election. While this is helpful for the board to help prioritize their focus, we also have other issues (such as the lease on our existing location) to factor into this topic. I expect to discuss further with the board.

Not important to move in 2019
1 - 25%
2 - 14%
3 - 38%
4 - 14%
5 - 9%
Very important to move in 2019

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So… raise dues to $35 and grandfather existing members @ $25 for 1 year, stay downtown and plan for the move to occur in 2020?

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You forgot to say we open the doors to our new space just before we host the 2020 Nation of Makers Conference :wink:

I am really happy that so many people took this survey.

BUT I’m also confused, because only six months ago we posted our 2018 member feedback survey right after the board was elected, to ask what the board should focus on. The overwhelming item with a VERY clear majority was “find a new building”.

What changed, between now and then? Did anyone here vote that finding a new building was “very important” back in June, but “not important” now?

This was only six months ago… 79 people answered this question, only 6 of them (8%) said it was not important to move. Now it’s 25%.

I am just a volunteer like you all, I’ll do whatever the membership wants, we can’t get a new building without support. I just also can’t read everybody’s mind.

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Kim,

It is entirely expected to have that kind of variation in a survey of the types conducted here. One very noticeable thing is that twice as many took the current survey as participated in June.

The lack of participation in June could easily have partially been due to a lot of the members thinking that no one on the board would be amenable to changing their minds about their positions based on the survey results, so why bother? Maybe, then, what changed is the perception about whether it is worth the effort to respond to the survey. On the other hand, one person with a strong opinion could have decided to game the current survey by responding multiple times until they got bored.

Really, most likely the explanation is that how the question is asked, and what other questions lead up to it heavily influence opinion surveys. The June survey had a bit of a feel of ‘which of these would you like to see effort put into’? Also implying a question of ‘if effort is put into these things will you help’? Maybe some apparent support for ‘Finding a new building’ was actually a vote against putting effort into the other choices.

Who responded could be very little overlap.

The non-responses cannot be interpreted necessarily as either indifference or as reflected in the responses.

Survey design and interpretation is a hard problem.

Mike B

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This is what I was thinking too. It was almost like multiple choices in the first survey. Like, what’s most important of these 5 things as compared to just asking how important this one thing is.

I dunno. But I agree with the results and I only took the survey once. 147 responses seems like a lot more than usual.

So tonight I pulled up the survey results and read through all the text answers to the question “Should we move? Why or why not?” I figured if one person wanted to take the survey 50 times and they took the time to write up a unique answer all 50 times then hell, I’ll listen to them. I found two duplicate answers.

Next to each answer I tried to summarize whether they were telling us to move, and got these numbers:
yes - 48
no - 34
maybe - 43
no text left - 22

It’s a different question for sure, one person voted “1 = not important to move” but said in their text that “yes we should move because a bigger place means more services”.

The ones I labeled “maybe” were a spectrum. A lot of them just had a ton of “only if” clauses in their text… only if our financials are rock solid, only if we find the perfect space, only if we know it will drive membership growth, only if it’s not too far, only if it doesn’t increase dues. Or a lot of them said something like “I’m fine with our current space but I’d understand if we’d move”, especially newer members.

Every single person who voted “5 = moving is very important” had unique text explaining why. There were no blanks. There were six blank 1s, 2 blank 2s, 11 blank 3s, two blank 4s.

Top reasons to move:
Parking
Ceramics
Electrical capacity
Climate control

Top reasons not to move:
There are still opportunities to clean junk out of our current space
People just really like our current douglas location (very central, good foot traffic) and worry we can’t duplicate it
Too much work, we’re maxed out on volunteer capacity
Building is rarely overcrowded, except for events

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Thanks, Kim, for going into the comments, and analyzing what they represent. I do believe the membership and the community have some mixed feelings about the best way to move forward. Their responses, and your analysis should be confirmation of the need to proceed with care and with thoughtful attention to detail.

Mike B

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