Design surveys and analyze data for local and, now recently, regional fencing tournaments; with the goal of doing a survey for Summer Nationals.
The neat thing about surveys is that they gather information (fencer’s opinions, behaviors, issues, attitudes, ideas) in a standard uniform way so that everyone gets asked the same questions, the same way. This insures answers are influenced by their experiences rather than some interviewer’s subjective or bias wording. So, it’s easy to get the opinions of two or three people but that’s usually not representative of the whole tournament population, and it’s nearly impossible to get everyone’s opinion. Surveys are good for fencing tournaments, especially bigger ones such as yours, because they allow us to collect a large amount of information, in a quick, efficient and anonymous way.
Currently, I’ve been doing all the survey design and data analysis for the USF (University of South Florida) Fencing Team, and at the moment, the War of the Roses tournament (A2 rated, 3 weapon, 30+ fencers per event tournament run by the USFA Central Florida Division). The interesting thing about the USF fencing Club is that they are new to the competitive fencing game and are starting to hold decent sized (A2 rated 40+ fencers per event) tournaments. They wanted to find ways to improve their tournaments and we did that by getting competitor feedback via surveys. What they found was, sometimes, in person, people tell us one thing about our events, however, the survey results tell us a whole other story. Since then, I’ve issued surveys to competitors at the end of every tournament by doing a mass email, through askFRED, to all the competitors saying, “thanks for coming, please take a minute to answer 10 quick questions about the tournament so that we can improve future events.’’ And the surveys typically get back a decent sample, 10-20 percent of the tournament population, along with various opinions from fencing competitors.
The lack of some responses could be due to a variety of things. People are more likely to make a complaint about something before they report the positive. So, many might feel the tournament went well, alright and was good so there’s really nothing for them to say. Also, a lot of times, the first responses are from the type of people who are usually on top of things: consistently checking their email, providing customer feedback, etc. The askFRED email might have been red flagged or spammed by some email boxes; and then there’s others who might not get to the survey until they are off work, not busy, or just don’t like doing surveys.