2018 Membership Survey Results

Many thanks to all who completed the 2018 membership survey. You can read about the survey and the results below.

Introduction

The survey was a follow-up to the 2013 survey and was intended to help the committee to ensure that the touring programme and other services offered by the club continue to meet the needs of members. Some questions were the same as in 2013, several were modified and some new ones added.

The survey was run through SurveyMonkey and the questions were designed by a sub-group comprising John Barnard, Richard Davison, Pete Lancaster and Susie Amann. A final draft survey was tested amongst a number of people, some of whom weren’t involved in the design work.

The survey was promoted through an email to all subscribing members, the e-newsletter, the Facebook secret group and the website. It was open from 29 September to 15 October.

Headline results

The main results

• There were 294 responses, which gives a response rate of 20%. The 2013 survey was completed by 439 members (36% of the total membership at that time).
• The 2018 survey sample is roughly representative of the membership as a whole (small bias towards older and more experienced members, and towards male members).
• Our membership is getting older and more experienced, but the average age of those joining (with membership of one year or less) is 45 years (against a club average age of 56 years).
• Members are more active skiers outside the club, but do more of their hut-to-hut touring and instructional / training trips within the club.
• More people have gone on instructional / training trips, day tours and hut-to-hut tours in the official club programme in the three years up to the 2018 survey compared to 2013.
• The touring programme is well supported but there are concerns about the timing of its publication, the need for more information about trips and leaders, and costs.
• Future demand is strongest for instructional / training trips and unguided day tours and hut-to-hut tours. Some members want to see more unguided and member-led tours, more lower-grade tours and one or two more low-cost trips.
• The most important services were the touring programme, yearbook, training courses, website, newsletters and member to member tours. The least important services were summer weekend meets, social events and grants.
• People strongly support the club’s role in providing training. Many people are pretty active in training and about 76% are interested in doing more training in the next 3 seasons.
• It’s important to train tour leaders and to subsidise this. Members also thought the Club should do more to keep people up-to-date on new ways of doing things and do a bit more on informal training and practice.
• Lectures and social events are not very popular, partly reflecting our dispersed membership and because people have other networks/memberships for non-skiing activities.
• Symposiums appeal to about a third of members, but getting the focus and location/activities right is important.
• Climate care continues to be pretty important to the vast majority of members, but there is some uncertainty about the value of carbon offsetting.
• Finding good ways of helping members to contact other local members seems to be more important than striving to be more inclusive and “bottom up”.
• Remember that the club works well, is healthy and we should be proud of it – but you can’t please all of the members all of the time!!

You can find a summary report and the basic data analysis below. The "Membership survey 2018 - summary of main findings" document provides a more detailed summary of the results and comments. The "Membership survey 2018 - results - final version" document provides the basic breakdown of data for each question.

Next steps

The Committee will be reviewing the findings and looking at what the results mean for the Club's strategy. This may result in some revisions being made to the strategy.