Discussion: How do we improve how we collect feedback from Meetup groups?

Every year, we distribute a survey to members of official WordPress meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. groups to gather statistics about the program as well as individual groups, in order to help improve the program.

Since we’ve started distributing the Meetup annual survey in 2014, we haven’t seen a very high response rate. For the 2018 survey, with 385,250 members in 691 groups, we only received 912 responses.

In collecting feedback on the recent post about revising the survey questions, it has occurred to me that we could do much more than improve the questions on the survey. Below are all the options we’ve thought of so far:

  • Improving the survey questions. We’ve discussed this previously.
  • Improving the promotion of the survey. Are there other ways we could promote the survey aside from sending a message via meetup.com?
  • Changing the timing of the survey. In the past, we’ve sent the survey in December or January, which have been pointed out as a busy time of year for many people’s inboxes.
  • Translating the survey. Would having the survey translated to non-english languages help improve engagement?
  • Building a new tool. One idea is to build a new tool, perhaps something like the proposed Speaker Feedback tool, but for each meetup.

Are there any of these options that you feel may work well for collecting feedback from Meetup groups? Do you have other ideas we could explore? Please comment if you have any thoughts, by 10 November 2019.