Report: Mini-Grant For Makerspace Survey Incentive Prizes

U T A with star in the center, used when staff photo is unavailable

by Martin Wallace
January 14 2017

In spring 2016 the UTA Libraries Maker Literacy Task Force (MLTF), in collaboration with the Texas Innovation Group (TIG), began developing a survey intended to gauge makerspace culture. We originally planned to survey only makerspaces in Texas, in preparation for a presentation to be delivered at the Texas Library Association’s annual conference. After more discussion about this it occurred to us that the survey could serve additional purposes beyond presenting at TLA, and decided that we would launch the survey nationally.

The survey was being designed to gather data on topics such as location, funding, accessibility, user demographics, staffing, equipment, outreach, educational programs, and other policies. After initial testing of the survey, we determined that because of its lengthiness, we may not get very many completed surveys. The survey was taking up to one hour for some of our testers to complete. We decided that the survey would need to be broken into two parts, a general questionnaire and an in-depth questionnaire that would only be revealed to respondents who answered certain questions from the general questionnaire in specific ways, using some tracking and logic features built into Qualtrics (the platform used for developing the survey). The general questionnaire would be a quick 10-15 minute survey, while the in-depth questionnaire would require commitment of significantly more time on an opt-in basis by dedicated respondents. This is when we decided that incentives were needed to encourage survey takers to fully complete the in-depth survey.

To fund survey incentive prizes, we submitted a UTA Libraries Mini-Grant proposal to offer ten (10) $50.00 MakerShed gift cards that would be be randomly awarded to respondents who completed the full survey. The Mini-Grants Committee accepted our proposal. We launched the survey the first week of August (2016), and set a September 30th deadline for respondents to complete the survey. We distributed the survey to many relevant email lists, social media groups, and to everyone who attended the White House Nation of Makers Summit in August.

Between the times applying for the mini-grant and being awarded the mini-grant, we had to make a significant change of plans. As stated above, we were initially planning a two-part survey: a general questionnaire and an in-depth questionnaire. In our proposal, only participants who completed the in-depth portion of the survey would qualify for incentive prizes. However, re-developing the survey in the described manner would have required significant revision of our beta test survey, and we didn’t have time or know-how to make those changes (I consulted with a representative from Qualtrics who said it could only be done by redesigning the survey from the ground up, and with an overly complex logical structure much different than our original design). We decided to leave the survey as-is, and instead of offering incentives to anyone completing a second, in-depth questionnaire, we would offer the incentive to anyone who fully completed the one, very long, survey (the survey consists of 80 questions total, but many of them are conditional questions that are only triggered if questions before them are answered in a certain way).

Our measures for success were to get a minimum of 100 respondents to the general questions of the survey and a minimum of 25 respondents to the in-depth questions of the survey. After making the decision to not revise the survey, we agreed that our new measures for success would be to get a minimum of 100 attempted completions, and minimum of 25 completions. We felt that most respondents attempting the survey would answer the very questions originally meant to go into our general questionnaire, and those who fully completed the survey would have answered the same amount of questions that would have originally been in our two-part questionnaire. We were able to more than meet our minimum measures for success by our deadline; we received 120 attempted survey responses with 71 completed.

During the first week of October, prize recipients were selected randomly using the built-in random sample feature in Qualtrics. The qualifying pool of respondents were those who completed the full survey who also provided their contact information (which was optional). We worked with Shante Hackworth, UTA Libraries budget manager, and Audrey Donaldson, a representative from MakerShed, to distribute the incentive prizes.

We had set the deadline for survey completion based on our deadline for expending incentive prize funds. By that deadline we had received 120 attempted survey responses with 71 completed surveys. It was at this time that Audrey Donaldson at MakerShed offered to provide additional survey incentive prizes in order to allow us to extend the survey and gather more responses. Because of this gracious offer, we were able to re-open the survey for an additional two months, to close on November 30th. The second round of the survey gathered 49 additional attempts and 8 additional completed surveys, for a total of 169 attempted survey responses with 79 completed. Winners from the second round were notified the first week of December. For a list of incentive prize recipients, and the list of additional incentive prizes offered by MakerShed, see the announcement on our blog.

The data from this survey will be used for a variety of purposes that will benefit the Texas Innovators Group, UTA Libraries Maker Literacy Task Force, the UTA FabLab, and makerspaces nationally. We have three goals in mind: 1) to create a database of makerspaces in Texas; 2) to identify a set of best-practices aimed at creating new maker programs and improving existing ones; and 3) to be used in a variety publications and presentations including but not limited to the “State of Make: Texas” program to be held at the 2017 Texas Library Association conference being conducted by the Texas Innovators Group (which the UTA FabLab is a part of). There are other indirect benefits; it is hoped that we can use this data to support grant funding for the UTA FabLab and initiatives of the Maker Literacy Task Force. Because we wish to make this unique and comprehensive data set available to the makerspace movement at-large, we can expect to raise the profile of UTA FabLab nationally and internationally. Once we have completed some data analysis for our immediate needs, we will publish the aggregated and anonymized data for anyone to access. We hope to share this data by April 2017.

I personally would like to give thanks to Thomas Finley, Katie Musick Peery and Cecilia Barham for their help in designing, testing and distributing the survey. I would also like to show my great appreciation to Shante Hackworth and Audrey Donaldson for all their help with distributing prizes (with even more appreciation heaped onto Audrey for providing additional incentives!). Finally, I must thank everyone who took the survey, even those who didn’t complete the full survey. Every little bit helps. To those you managed to complete the entire survey, big thanks for your enviable stamina and perseverance; we know it wasn’t easy.

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