By: Erin Darby
As a client of Epiphany Community Services, we offer annual capacity surveys/reports. We use capacity reports to help identify the organization’s areas of strength, as well as areas of potential improvement internally as part of your contract. The capacity survey also identifies how your organization’s members feel about what the organization is doing and the work they do to support it. A capacity report helps identify the gaps between members that know more about the organization and what is going on and those who may not be able to participate but would like to. Areas touched on in the survey include purpose, logistics, marketing strategies, commitment diversity, ability to foster teamwork, decision-making process, member support, relationship with local government and other key leaders, and funding and sustainability. Using the data from the volunteer questionnaire, an overall composite score is then calculated for each section (i.e., purpose, logistics, etc.). The composite score was calculated by averaging each individual’s scores for all the statements in a section, then averaging the scores of the entire group. The composite score is based on a 7-point scale; scores five or higher are viewed as positive as they are above the neutral midpoint of 4. The composite scores are good indicators of an organization’s successes and areas of potential improvement.
To ensure that the data are valid and relevant, we ask that clients complete the questionnaires within a relatively small window of time of 60 days. The link will open on the day of your choosing and allow you to take the survey until the 60 days are up unless you decide otherwise. Knowing your time frame also allows us to monitor the questionnaire. We will check in with you periodically to let you know how many members have completed the questionnaire and a reminder to keep pushing out the survey. The survey tends to take about 10 minutes to complete, and all responses are anonymous. We suggest having the start date also be a day that there is a scheduled meeting to allow members time to complete the survey instead of asking them to do it at a later time. Thus, allowing members that could not attend the meeting to have the remaining 59 days to complete the survey. We do sometimes know this method does not work for every organization, so we ultimately provide suggestions but let you choose how to distribute the survey.
ECS will then set up and send the main contact person from the organization a link for the member survey, along with a link for the staff survey. The member survey we ask you to distribute that way it comes from a familiar name in the community. The member survey is for anyone in the organization that is not considered staff, as we acknowledge those on staff will know more about what is happening within the organization. Volunteers are asked to rate their level of agreement on several statements for each topic, using a 7-point scale where 1 represented “Strongly Disagree,” and 7 represented “Strongly Agree.” In addition to the member survey, we created a staff survey for writing purposes so we are able to compare what the members said and what the staff said about what the Organization has done in the past 12 months. We ask that only one person complete and fill out this survey so there are no competing thoughts. For example, if volunteers were unaware of the Organization’s mission and values, the staff data were reviewed to see if that information was shared with volunteers.
Typically, clients will go through this process once a year or every other year to monitor the organization internally and where to make improvements moving forward. If the organization has participated in the process at least twice, we do offer a past year comparison of questions and areas of improvement.
Contact Erin today to set up your organization’s Capacity Assessment!