State of the Sector survey
You may already have seen the various notices for the State of the Sector survey on social media, and some of you have very kindly provided feedback on draft versions, for which we’re extremely grateful. There are inevitable compromises involved in trying to balance a comprehensive piece of work with the practicality of encouraging high completion rates, but we’re determined not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. We hope you understand the challenge, and share our ambition to attempt to provide the sector, commissioners and other stakeholders with the robust dataset we need to describe the sector accurately, and to be able to identify and track strengths and challenges as they change over time.
We are committed to publishing as much of the raw data as we can, as well as the analysis (it’s all anonymous), which hopefully will complement and contextualise your own local insight work. The project as a whole will also draw on a much wider set of evidence and data, much of which no doubt will have originated with many of you, so please do draw my attention to anything you feel I’m unaware of. Later in the autumn/early winter I’m anticipating some more qualitative opportunities for individuals and organisations to participate in group and individual conversations on aspects of this, as obviously surveys only take you so far.
In order for us to be able statistically to extrapolate findings to the whole of Devon, Plymouth and Torbay’s VCSE sector, we do need a good number of responses, so we’d be extremely grateful if you could support this effort (as well as completing it on behalf of your own organisations, though I know some questions feel less relevant to infrastructure organisations). This survey is only intended for registered charities and social enterprises – we’re hoping to develop a piece of work looking at unregistered groups shortly, where there is even less reliable data. The link to the survey is here, and it will be open until 4th October: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6CPC7KW.
