2024 Feedback Surveys
About the Seattle Trans & Nonbinary Choral Ensemble (STANCE)
The Seattle Trans And Nonbinary Choral Ensemble (better known as STANCE) is the first—and only—choir in the Seattle area for transgender and nonbinary singers. STANCE's mission is to provide a vocal community free of gendered expectations, by and for Transgender and Nonbinary singers, to explore and express themselves through music. Founded in 2022, the organization has quickly grown to have 75 active singers, which is a surprisingly large organization given its recency and niche.
Project Overview
The Executive Director of STANCE decided in spring of 2024 that it was a good time to conduct feedback on the performance of the paid and volunteer staff of the organization. I am the Singer Liaison for the choir, which means that I as I participate in the choir, I listen to the feedback and concerns that singers bring to me and, when appropriate, bring those to the attention of the Board of Directors and staff. As part of this role, I was already preparing an end-of-cycle survey for singers regarding their experience singing with us that concert cycle, and I agreed to additionally take on the staff performance review assessment because some of the questions would overlap.
The objective of this project was to obtain feedback from the STANCE Board, singers, and staff about the 2024 Spring concert cycle. We needed to assess staff performance, the organization's overall engagement and performance with regards to our mission and values, identify areas where the organization is strong, and gain an understanding of where additional support is needed. Through discussing the project needs with the Executive Director and the Board Co-Chair, we decided to conduct three surveys, collecting interrelated data.
Project Plan
I began the project by creating a project plan for all three surveys:
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A board survey, with questions about the performance of individual staff members
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A singer survey, with questions about the Spring concert cycle, and feedback about STANCE staff as a group, with an option to write in answers if singers had specific feedback about individual staff members
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A staff survey, with questions to reflect on their own performance and that of their peers
My project plan included audience and role definitions, timelines, and methodologies. I first presented my plan to the Executive Director and Co-Chair, and once I received the go-ahead for my plan outline, I began collaborating with the people I needed to consult with me on the project. My primary collaborators were the Co-Chair (in their professional capacity as a human resources manager), the board Secretary, and a member of the choir who is a research subject matter expert (SME).
Survey Drafting
I created the initial questions in separate Google Documents, which would then be copied into a Google Form for response collection.
Our Co-chair provided me with the basic questions that they generally use for conducting performance feedback, and I crafted my questions based on those. Some of the questions overlaped between all three surveys, and some were unique to each survey. The surveys were conducted via three separate Google Forms. Questions were a mix of Likert-scale multiple choice questions and open-ended questions. Likert-scale questions included an “other” option for those whose thoughts were not represented in the provided array of options. Because the singer survey asked for a roll-up evaluation of all staff (rather than evaluating individual staff members), the "other" option provided an opportunity for singers to give specific feedback on individual staff members. This option kept an already-long survey brief, while giving the flexibility for more granular answers to those who wanted an opportunity to provide them.
I utilized our research SME to ensure that the questions we asked followed best-practices in bias-reduction and clarity. Our Secretary also provided invaluable feedback, as he works professionally as a music teacher and has a deep understanding of what it takes to be successful leading a group of musicians with different levels of experience.
The Co-Chair was able to see the answers of all three surveys.
Data Collection
In addition to the Likert-scale multiple choice questions that I asked, there were also 40 open-ended questions across all three surveys. Those, combined with the write-in "other" answers that were options for participants who were not satisfied with the multiple-choice options provided, totaled 1,016 individual qualitative comments that needed to be organized and themed into usable, actionable feedback for leadership. Having analyzed research data many times in my career, I utilized the data organizational skills that I have refined over time to meet this large data-management challenge.
3
Surveys
53
Participants
76%
Singer completion
87
Questions
47
Multiple-choice
1k+
Comments
I created charts in Google Sheets to visualize singer participation in the feedback process, so that I could communicate relevant differences in answers based on their vocal section, concert cycle attendance, and/or participation in our music education course or Outreach ensemble.
