The STC Community Health Checkup—What You Told Us, Part One

Posted on behalf of Ben Woelk, Community Outreach Team Lead for the STC Community Affairs Committee. Click on the graphics to view a larger version.

This article presents an overview of the Community Health Checkup that we asked community leaders to complete in Fall 2012. We had 66 participants in the survey, but we didn’t hear from all of the communities. (Some communities had more than one submission to the survey.)

The Community Affairs Committee Outreach Team has been up and running for about a year. We’ve had many conversations with community leaders and you’ve told us about the “ups and downs” of running your communities. These conversations have been helpful in determining what areas are doing well, challenges you’re facing, and what community-specific and shared needs that communities have. We’ve provided the survey results to the STC Board of Directors and to the Steve Skojec, Director of Community Relations.

Mollye Barrett, Outreach Team Member, revised a previous survey to ensure the questions were relevant. The Community Health Checkup included eleven questions on various aspects of community life, many of which allowed for open responses. We’ll look at some of the overview questions in this article and delve into some specific issues in future installments.

General Community Health

 

The responses to the general Community Health question indicates that STC is pretty evenly split between communities that believe they are doing well and those that believe they are not doing well. We’ll look at some of specific issues in the next article.

Community Offices

 

The responses show that about 68% of communities have all offices filled, while 32% have one or more offices open. One of the challenges STC communities face is finding enough volunteers.

Use of Social Media

 

Almost all communities are using social media as part of their outreach strategies and to provide news to their constituents. (It would be interesting to see how much this usage has grown over the last five years.)

Competitions

 

Our general sense in talking with communities is that many are finding that the numbers of entries in competitions is decreasing and that they may not provide the income that they did previously.

What’s Next?

In our next installment, we’ll discuss comments about general community health and identify some of the common challenges that communities face and discuss how communities, the Community Affairs Committee, and STC are addressing them through increased communication, mentoring, the Leadership Program and other resources. We’ll be interested in your proposed or actual solutions as well! Stay tuned!

STC Leadership Resources may be found at http://stc.org/mystc/resources/leadership-resources. Please direct any questions to cac@stc.org.