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Greetings, homebrewers and NTHBA club members. This year, after several years having passed since the last one, we set a goal to send out another club survey. Gathering feedback from membership about the state of things currently and where the club can focus efforts to make for a better member experience is important. So, in July, a concise questionnaire was made available for members to complete. This post is meant to provide a summary of the results of the survey and takeaways from it.

With around 50 club members at the time of the survey send, we received 25 surveys back – a 50% return rate, which is excellent. One of my goals in compiling the questions was to make it as concise as possible, avoiding unnecessary or repetitive questions, so as to make it more palatable to complete. This then should contribute to better returns and validate any findings…and hopefully did.

With that, on to the results, but first, apologies if the labels get cut off in the images. This is just how Google Forms renders the results. Hopefully, you get the gist, but my commentary will call out the prevailing results.

Question 1:

NTHBA has ebbs and flows between more socially oriented and competition oriented. These results point more towards social over competition at this time. Additionally, education is ranked 3rd(more about that below). Competition is still an important component, but it appears to be taking a back seat right now.

Question 2:

Glad to know that NTHBA is overwhelmingly viewed as open and inviting. I hope things stay that way.

Question 3:

Education here is not surprisingly at the top of the list, which we have been aware of since the last survey and working to enhance this year. Hopefully, you see this from Bill Lawrence in the newsletter, as well as his presentation at the August club meeting. We hope to have more of these in the future, along with some presentations/demos at brew days, and perhaps a webinar or two. If you have any specific suggestions or requests, please reach out to our education czar at [email protected]. The other standout responses were more events, and interestingly that NTHBA needs no major improvements.

Question 4:

Not a lot to say about this. I don’t think I was around when club membership exceeded 200 members, so I don’t know what it was like managing that. I’d say it was around 100 when I first joined and found that events . I don’t know that we will see 200+ again, but we could stand to add some members and fresh faces.

Questions 5-6:

Both very positive responses…

Questions 7-9:

The majority of us are satisfied with the meeting times and locations. I have personally received feedback that BYO meetings are a welcomed addition. However, we also know that this may not be practical for every meeting. As the one who schedules the meetings, I have found it more and more difficult to find locations that do not have some other activity like trivia competing with the club conducting a quality meeting. Because of this, I personally would not mind maintaining a single location for the majority of our meetings with a few “outings” to other locations. If it comes down to quality of the meeting versus the effort expended to find a legitimate location, I am going to choose the former. We will continue to tweak this going forward.

Question 10-11:

We came close to abandoning the raffle this year, but will continue to fund it for the foreseeable future. The fact of the matter was that supplying the raffle became too cumbersome without a local source, so the quality suffered. With North Texas Homebrew Supply opening up, we will be better equipped. As to the content of meetings, we hear you that various educational presentations and guest speakers would enhance them and we will continue efforts to provide these going forward.

Question 12:

Questions 13-14:

Since I have been involved with the club and as an officer, there has been 100% consistency in delivery of the monthly newsletter. Although it takes some effort, the officers take seriously getting their articles and and the newsletter published at the first of each month. Having said this, the new website is equipped to provide a consistent stream of communication on an ongoing basis. This blog post is an excellent example. I am not on Facebook and many others are not active on it either. So, we do not want to rely on social media as a soul form of communication. With our website and the newsletter, we have the ability to communication with 100% of the membership. I do recommend you take a moment to subscribe to blog posts here and also set yourself up in the forum.

Question 14:

This is about what I expected to see. I do hope to see more participation and engagement in the club forum.

Questions 15-17:

I have seen most of you at at least one brew day over the last few years and the favorite aspects of them aren’t surprising. There are some simple enhancements we can do to add to the value of the club brew days, which the officers will discuss. The predominantly requested enhancements can easily be made part of the scheduling and communication with the host.

Question 18:

The layout of this pre-built chart is a bit confusing, but hopefully the question wasn’t. Here’s the order of ranking. 1st and 2nd are obvious, but the last two are a bit more murky.
1) Winter/Holiday Party
2) Fall/Oktoberfest Party
3) Spring Party
4) Summer Party

The Spring and Summer parties are the least favored, but between 3rd and 4th place votes, the Spring party came ahead leaving the Summer party in 4th. All of the parties are great and usually well attended. There has been discussion about dropping one from the schedule, but we will see. If you haven’t been to any, I encourage you to make plans to come to one in the future.

Question 19:

We have had a few this year with some well attended and others only sparsely. There is clearly an interest in continuing these, so we will continue scheduling them.

Question 20-22:

Fairly self-explanatory, but nice to know we don’t appear to be overdoing it on events. Two-thirds of us attend the majority of them.

That’s it. Sorry for the long post. If you have any questions or comments about the survey, please feel free to email me here.

Cheers,
Smitty