Methodology
During the period 1 Jun - 26 Sep, surveys were run at five RAF units as interactive workshops with audiences comprising serving and non- serving family members, as well as sessions with the RAF Community Support and Future Commanders Study Period courses at the Defence Academy. The team used the Turning Point voting system to collect all data and this was then downloaded onto the Federation system.
The surveys were also made available on the Federation website and promoted via press releases, Families Days and conferences, regular articles in Envoy, the Diaspora newsletter, Station magazines, RAF News, BFBS radio and AMP’s Bulletin.
The surveys were drawn to the attention of many key contacts within the chain of command, with particular support from AMP’s Briefing Team, who advised unit audiences they visited of the Federation’s work in this area – we remain grateful for their enduring support. Social networking also worked well, with Facebook fans and Twitter and Blog followers cascading the survey, enabling the Federation to reach a far wider audience than otherwise would have been achieved.
Although live audience levels ranged, the decision to place the surveys online opened up our work to a much wider audience. For the first time, we were able to gather evidence from those living overseas, those living ‘beyond the wire’ and those living in their own communities but still part of the RAF family. As expected the majority of online voters came from UK RAF
bases, however, personnel based in Cyprus, South Africa, Belgium, Brunei, the USA, Germany, Italy, Kenya and New Zealand also responded.
Our original plan was to password protect the surveys but, having seen the AFF and NFF successfully run unprotected surveys on Future Accommodation, following consultation with the RAF, we agreed to lift the passwords from all but our Youth and Reservists surveys. This resulted in significantly higher numbers of votes and, whilst there was a risk that some votes might be spurious and the quality of our data therefore compromised to some degree, this risk was deemed acceptable, given the limited awareness of our website and the surveys beyond those within the RAF community.
In total, so far, we have gathered more than 2,700 votes across the eight surveys. Results were downloaded from the ‘Kwik Survey’ system onto the Federation system and combined with data collected from those who voted during workshops, creating a significant pool of evidence. Surveys will remain open until 31 October.
The full report of the Federation’s evidence- gathering activity for this year will be available as comprehensive Evidence Reports, accompanying our 2011 Annual Report; AFPRB members will, of course, be included in the distribution.
What we can provide at this stage is an insight into the top-level findings emerging from our data so far which, we hope, will be of interest and value to the AFPRB.
www.raf-ff.org.uk
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