Year-over-Year Member Surveys – St. Louis Association of REALTORS®
Goals
(1) Identify any gains (or if the organization is losing ground) in the eyes of the member.
(2) Pay attention to member feedback about special areas where SLAR focused time and effort in the past year.
(3) Track changes in member awareness and satisfaction of SLAR’s service offerings every year.
Approach
We create and deploy a survey with questions addressing value, importance and satisfaction. While most questions are consistent year to year, occasionally a few of them change. This helps address the most relevant offerings.
In addition to analyzing membership as a whole, we survey two member segments who are very important to the organization. We compare these two sets of responses with the overall results.
Outcome and Feedback
“Our goal isn’t to determine member services through the survey, (although we do read every comment and consider the impact of a suggestion or complaint) our goal is to ‘move the needle’ and to quantify that movement. This provides a correlation between our performance and member satisfaction.
We take a longitudinal approach. We do the same purposive sampling every year with essentially the same questions. The year-over-year survey helps account for self-selection bias (often the people most likely to respond are the very happy and unhappy). Ideally we want to see very happy even happier and are the unhappy less unhappy.
True value is established by making sure you are measuring the right things (reliability) and mitigating self-selection bias to increase validity. We do our member surveying annually with the same questions and an established benchmark to ensure the validity of our members responses.”
– Dawn Kennedy, CEO
St. Louis Association of REALTORS®
