Practice: surveying members

Practice scenario: surveying. You need to build structure around identifying members' feedback and needs. Create a plan for surveying members that engages multiple departments and communicates results back out.

This is one of three practice scenarios from the consensus deck. The exercise is to apply the full toolkit — scope, roles, deadlines, agreements, consensus, tools, plan — to a project that does not yet exist. Pretend you are starting from scratch on this Monday.

Walk through the move: (1) Scope. Define objectives. "Deliver a member feedback survey with 250+ responses, in two languages, by [date 8 weeks out]." Resource plan. Theory of change ("if members feel heard, retention improves"). KPIs (responses per week, response rate by language, completion rate).

(2) Roles. Owner: communications director. Helpers: program staff, language access volunteers. Consulted: ED, board chair. Approver (of the survey instrument): program director. (3) Deadlines. Working backwards from the response close date: instrument finalized 4 weeks out, soft launch 3 weeks out, full launch 2 weeks out, response close 0, analysis 1 week post-close, findings memo 2 weeks post-close.

(4) Consensus. Use a digital whiteboard with the program team to draft the question categories. Affinity cluster the proposed questions. Dot vote to narrow to 15 questions. (5) Tools. Google Forms for the instrument. Sheets for response tracking. WhatsApp + email for outreach. (6) Plan. Build the task list. Share out at the weekly check-in. Reflect at the retro.