Upon reaching CSTA’s first birthday, we set out to determine how satisfied our members are with CSTA’s services and member benefits. With help from Michelle Kitaoka from Georgia Tech, we used Survey Monkey to set up an extensive online survey. As a reward for taking the time to complete our survey, we offered an incentive. Every member who completed the survey was entered into a draw for a NavMan 100 Pocket GPS Locator.
And the winner is Joan Wheeler of Jackson Memorial High School in New Jersey!
Joan was one of 634 CSTA members who completed the survey, giving us a total response rate of 16.8%, which is very respectable for an online survey.
Apart from the chance to give away fun stuff, the survey also provided us with information about how our members perceive us, and how we can provide more valuable benefits in future.
One of the most important things that we learned is that we need to do a better job of letting our members know what their benefits are. Although the benefits are listed on the CSTA website and in the welcoming email we send to all new members, many members told us that until they completed the survey, they were not aware of the extensive list of resources and publications they can access. As a result of this feedback, we will be working on new ways to let members know about all of our member benfits.
We also learned that overall, member satisfaction is very high.
86.9% rated the CSTA website as Good-Excellent
79.1% rated the CSTA Voice newsletter as Good-Excellent
69.4% rated the CSTA Advocate blog as Good-Excellent
71.1% rated the relevance of the Advocate blog postings Good-Excellent
We also learned that both awareness of and satisfaction with our JETT/TECS workshops and the annual Computer Science Information Technology (CS&IT) Symposium are very good. A total of 63% of our members have been to a JETT/TECS workshop and 50% plan to participate in future workshops. While only 43% have attended a CS&IT symposium, more than 62% plan to do so in future.
More than half of our members (62.5%), however, have not used the ACM Model Curriculum for K-12 Computer Science or its accompanying documents, and 89.2% have not used the K-12 Virtual binders, mostly because they were not aware that they even existed! The results are similar for access to the Careers Resource Center
Perhaps the most important thing we learned from this survey, however, is what we can do to make CSTA an even better value for our members. The top five new benefits our members have requested are:
1. more online computer science resources
2. a national conference on K-12 computer science education
3. an online discussion forum
4. classroom posters
5. brochures for students and parents
The good news is that we are currently working on every single one of these right now!