How do you design and implement a volunteer feedback survey for your arts events or projects?

Designing and implementing a volunteer feedback survey for your arts events or projects is essential for gathering insights, improving processes, and ensuring a positive experience for volunteers. Start the survey with a welcoming message expressing gratitude for the volunteers' contributions. Ensure volunteers feel appreciated from the beginning. Include demographic questions to gather information about volunteers, such as age, occupation, and previous volunteer experience. This data can provide context for feedback analysis. Tailor questions to the specific arts event or project. Ask about the clarity of instructions, the variety of tasks, and the volunteers' overall perception of the event.

When designing and implementing a volunteer feedback survey for arts events or projects, timing and simplicity are crucial. I make sure to request feedback promptly, ideally while volunteers are still on site. This way, the experience is fresh in their minds, and we don’t have to chase them down later. I keep the survey as brief and straightforward as possible—just the essentials—because the more questions you add, the less likely people are to complete it. By focusing on these key aspects, I’ve found that we get more meaningful responses and can quickly make improvements for future events.

Some of the best survey tools that are suitable for volunteer surveys are Typeform, Survicate, AskNicely, Hubspot, QuestionPro and SurveyLegend.

No matter what survey platform is used, make sure that it is accessible and user friendly. The volunteer should not have to download an app, sign up for an account, or other multi-step process to leave feedback. They have already volunteered their time, and are volunteering again to give your organization feedback.

If your survey has questions with a Likert scale, be sure to be consistent with the rank answers. If the first option is "Never" and the last is "Always", every questions with that scaled should have the first option as "Never" and the last as "Always." Altering the scale could cause incorrect responses if a respondent wanted to score "Always" and simply clicked the last option on each question.

Provide some sort of incentive for completing the survey. People are more likely to complete a voluntary survey if they are rewarded for doing so. Consider sending a reminder in a different tone if your response rate is low. It is difficult to get people to participate in online surveys when they are being asked to do so, so think about creative survey design. Make the survey look easy and fun.

What good is a feedback survey if the results aren't reviewed? Sharing the raw data isn't recommended as it can be hard to identify trends. That being said, the data should be stored and made available incase the synthesized information needs further analysis. Help the stakeholders who will read results by creating the story by pulling trends and quotes. Present the information in both graphic and text forms to help the information be understood.