Club Survey Blackburn & District Camera Club 2011
Membership Questionnaire Questionnaires were handed out on President's night and at the following free and easy. Quite a lot were taken out by members but unfortunately only 15 were completed and returned. However that does represent approximately 50% of our normal attendance at meetings and is a reasonable sample.
The final two columns are self-explanatory they are the number of times that someone strongly agreed with the proposition and gave it five points or the number of times someone strongly disagreed and gave it one point. Unfortunately not all the respondents responded to every question and to make the analysis possible I had to insert answers into the gaps. If the failure to answer could be taken as “I do not care” then I scored it as a three whereas if the failure to respond appeared to be negative I gave it one or if it appeared to be an approval I gave it a five.
It is clear that the people who completed the questionnaire are the keenest members because the mean score for attendances is 81.6% of meetings. As you will probably guess the majority of the scores given were in fact 3s so I do not think that the gaps have seriously affected the results. Only one person said that they attended as few as 50% of the meetings. The first thing you will notice as you look down the columns is that the We do therefore have the opinion of the people attend but not of the people majority of questions resulted in an average score of around 3 meaning who do not attend. I am not sure how we can find out why people who do that people were neither terribly enthusiastic or terribly dissatisfied. not attend regularly do not do so. A table of the responses is included at the end of this report and I hope that it is self-explanatory. The first two columns are the question number followed by the question asked. The next 15 columns are the scores given by the members who returned questionnaires and following that art the mean, the median, the number of fives and the number of ones
Meetings Thankfully most people think that the subscription is reasonable with 11/15 respondents scoring it as a five. There is not any demand to increase the subscription to improve the quality of speakers, and those responding believe that the current balance of activities, slideshows and lectures is about right and does not need to be changed.
These are probably self-explanatory but for those of you who do not have a Personally I was a little disappointed to see that there was only a little mathematical or statistical background above average approval for the Mission Impossible type activity nights with · The mean is the straightforward average of the 15 scores rounded 6 people being strongly in favour and 4 people strongly disapproving. The to one decimal place average score came in at 3.3. ·
The median is the score which appears most frequently
I was also disappointed to see that there were not many people interested in showing their own work other than in competitions.
On the other hand questions have been raised about the suitability of the church hall and it was pleasing to note that the majority of respondents thought that the facilities are satisfactory that question scoring 4.7 which was the highest approval score of any question in the survey.
However the suggestion that we could attend museums and galleries was not met with wide approval and there was no clear preference given between trips midweek all weekend but evening trips were thought unattractive.
Other high scores were for an increase in the number of hands-on tutorial nights.
There was mixed support for the idea of a formal speaker night with a meal or supper with five people indicating they would like to buy a ticket for such an event and only two being strongly against the idea.
There was reasonable support for tutorials on camera handling and on the The idea of a weekend trip possibly with the opportunity to take along a basic principles of photography but the membership was agnostic or partner had an average score of just over three. However this was one unenthusiastic about Photoshop or computer nights. idea where there was both strong support and strong antagonism. Members are keen to see the photographs in the folios and judging nights Suggesting that at least part of the membership would like to consider for competitions are among the most popular events. such an event but others have no interest at all. In terms of lecturers the suggestion of looking at the work of professional There was a similar split on the idea of having a club photographic project photographers met with only limited enthusiasm and there was no demand with five people strongly in favour and five people strongly against an for looking at photo books or the works of famous or talented average score of 3.1. photographers. There was a mixed response to the suggestion that we could have special interest groups covering for example landscape, nature, portrait etc. Very often a photographer is good at or interested in one aspect of photography but has less interest or skill in another.
Communications
Six people strongly agreed with the idea of having specialist groups but four people were strongly against the idea.
People like the Newsletter and most are happy for it to move to a monthly publication. They would not be prepared to pay for it and most people are very happy to see it sent out by e-mail.
Activities
On a personal note I am pleased to discover that What's on and the Newsletter are popular and as anticipated we find that the website forum is not.
Over a third of the respondents said that they would be prepared to When it came to the question of trips and outings there was good approval contribute articles to the newsletter. for photography trips and an overall positive response to the idea that The majority of people know that if they have any point to make about the there should be more opportunities to go out and take photographs. club they can write to me secretary and have it raised at the next committee meeting. The score of 4.6 was the second highest result.
Similarly most members know that they can submit articles for inclusion in the newsletter.
I asked if people would be more likely to enter the competitions if the rules were changed but that met with an overwhelming no.
Unfortunately our other means of communication, the club forum had a neutral response with only six people saying that if they had a question about the club they would post on the forum with an equal number strongly disagreeing with that idea.
Finally I raised two pet ideas of my own one being that we ought to have a competition where you submit a portfolio of images but that is obviously not popular and secondly that we should have a AV competition and again only two people strongly agreed with that and five people strongly disagreed.
Eight of the respondents stated that they did not find the club forum a good way of keeping in touch with members or keeping up to date with club activities. Perhaps I need to do a further survey to find out why this aspect of the club appears to be disliked by some of the membership.
Competitions Competitions are popular but unfortunately I could not get an answer to why prints are unpopular. The respondents were given the opportunity of saying that this was because of cost but only three people said that was why they did not enter and only two people gave a text response essentially saying that it was too difficult or too much trouble to print and mount entries. I had wondered if the amount of Photoshop work was putting people off entering competitions but very few people seem to have a problem with that. There was no support for my suggestion that we could have a competition class where only limited Photoshop work was permissible. The majority of people score 4.2 are happy that they are in the correct class ie. beginner or advanced and a similar proportion believe that the photographer of the year competition works well as it is.