LYC Blog #2: How do you ask a good question?

LYC Development Manager Alice Beverley has been asking lots of questions recently…

Published March 2022

This February we decided to run a big evaluation project, giving all of our LYC members and their parents and guardians the opportunity to fill out a feedback survey on their experience of the choirs. This was my first foray into a mass survey project, and there were lots of questions to answer before we were able to ask any!

The first was to be clear what the purpose and uses of the collected feedback would be, to shape which questions we asked. We were hoping that the responses would help us prove our impact as a charity, so our questions were generally about whether participants felt like LYC had helped them improve in their singing, musicianship and confidence, and also assessing how inclusive and welcoming they found the choir.

But we also wanted to make sure responses would feed back into our programme of delivery and help shape our services, by finding out where we could be doing things differently or better. This is an important part of charity practice, creating a productive cycle which keeps helping us to improve. As a result, we put lots of free text boxes in all the surveys, so that people could elaborate on their answers and give more information on what they thought.

The next question was how to pitch our member survey to the age range of the choirs, hoping to make it comprehensible for all those aged 7-23. This was tricky, and I think could be improved on next time – one particular challenge was some of the juniors not realising that there was a back page to the survey, so we dropped a couple of responses there…

We also decided to make all the surveys anonymous, in the hope that everyone felt they could answer honestly, and to avoid ‘acquiescence bias’ – when people tell you what they think you want to hear, rather than their true thoughts – which was something I hadn’t thought of until reading 28 blog posts on how to write a good survey. This was sometimes scuppered by young people’s drilling at school to write their name on the top of all of their work, but in general I think helped with people’s openness.

While the parent and guardian surveys were sent via an online form, our member surveys were filled out on paper at rehearsals – this necessitated rather a lot of time spent digitalising their responses, but also meant we got a fantastic 83% response rate, with 268 young people filling out a survey. We hope this means that the answers are a fair representation of the members’ thoughts and feelings.

On the whole, responses were overwhelmingly positive, and seemed to show that we are achieving our aims of offering a welcoming and inclusive community in which to improve musical skills and broaden young people’s musical and social horizons: 92.1% of young people felt their singing had improved through taking part in the choir, and 97.3% felt that LYC was a welcoming community – yay!

Some interesting takeaways: Members used this opportunity to have their voices heard to ask for more opportunities to give input, particularly on the choices of what songs they sing. Some wanted to suggest songs to conductors, and some asked if they could be given a selection to vote on, showing a true commitment to democratic music-making. The survey also showed up how important the social side of LYC is to members, and that developing friendships with the other young people they are singing with makes a big difference to their experience of coming to choir. We’ve had less time to organise social choir activities during the pandemic, so we’ll definitely be trying to look into these suggestions and find ways to incorporate youth voice and social fun into our plans going forward.

Mostly, it was just a joy to read the responses, both those who said lovely things about the difference LYC had made to them, and those who had spent time thinking about and articulating how we could be even better. We’re really grateful to everyone who took the time to fill out a survey, and I will leave you with some of my favourite quotes.

“I’ve made loads of friends and I like the teachers… Everyone’s really nice! If you sing at the front, and get a note wrong, no one laughs, everyone encourages you to try again! And when you’ve done they all clap :)”

“I love LYC so much <3 it’s the highlight of my week, even though I’m busy with my A levels 🙂 Thank you for everything I’ve made so many friends and learnt so much. I feel safe, happy and at home here and the opportunities are incredible. ”

“Being in the choir has broadened my son’s understanding of people; his world has opened up because of it.”

“She is honestly so happy on rehearsal days I can see the joy in her eyes again and that is because of the friendships and skills she has made at LYC. It means more than I can say”

“I think this is the best choir I have been in, in my whole life”