Ahead Partnership is a non-profit organisation that works with businesses and schools to provide opportunities for employers to engage with young people about their future careers. They design and deliver activities such as careers events, interview practice, enterprise challenges and bespoke workshops.
Making the most of limited time
Gathering feedback from everyone involved – the students, schools, and businesses – is key to the success of Ahead Partnership’s programmes. They need to ensure that students are benefitting from the activities, and that the businesses participating and funding them are seeing results.
However, they only get a few hours with the students each time, and they want to spend as much time as possible on the activities, not gathering feedback.
Delivering a fantastic 20,000 responses
“From a practical point of view, paper is the only thing that works for us when we are collecting feedback from students.”
Nicola Hara, Office Manager
Ahead Partnership
Paper surveys
Ahead Partnership have tried using tablets to gather feedback, but with a limited number of tablets it takes up too much time passing them round from student to student. They’ve also found participants often don’t get round to completing follow-up surveys sent via email, and the activity isn’t as fresh in their mind.
With a short window of time to collect feedback from up to 100 students, handing out a paper survey is much quicker and more effective than an online survey. They can get the feedback immediately after the activities and the response rate is higher.
Scanning
Initially, Ahead Partnership was manually inputting all the data from the paper feedback surveys. But as the volume grew, this became too time consuming and a waste of valuable resources. They needed a more efficient and reliable data entry method, so they now use Snap Survey’s Scanning Edition.
With all the data collated it’s easy to analyse and produce different reports – schools get a report at the end of the academic year to demonstrate the impact, and businesses receive reports showing the positive outcomes, and what they can improve on.
The outcome
Last year, Ahead Partnership collected over 20,000 survey responses. The feedback has allowed them to measure the impact of their programmes and optimise the resources that they use.
They provide reports to businesses involved, demonstrating the positive outcomes and areas that can be improved. The reports help businesses meet their own objectives too by clearly showing the skills their volunteers have developed from taking part and how they feel it has benefitted their business or industry. Schools also get a report at the end of the academic year to show the impact of the activities.