Week Six

Since Week 5 was a slow, short week, I will talk about our meeting that we had with CTAN before the holiday break. Vanessa, Emily, and myself created a Power Point presentation. This presentation included some of the following information:

1) how many organizations we have sent the survey to

2) how many organizations have replied

3) some primarily statistics according to the responses we have received so far 

The meeting went pretty well. The first half was mostly discussions between the CTAN members and what was needed to be done for the upcoming year. Most of the information did not pertain to us, but it was most certainly a learning experience and seeing what goes on behind the scenes. The second half of the meeting was all about us, and it was our time to showcase our presentation and the data we collected. We started our presentation, and everyone seemed to enjoy the information that was being presented to them. It was also nice to hear feedback from the members along with some insightful suggestions. Most importantly, we compiled a list of the organizations separated into three different sections: organizations we could not get in contact with, organizations who were "dragging their feet", and organizations who were simply not interested. We gave out this list to everyone at the meeting, so they could all take a look. Everyone worked as a team, and we got many of the members to help us contact some of the organizations they were familiar and had connections with.  In addition, they gave us updated contact information for many of the site directors. Because of their help, we received many more responses. Lydia and Chantel were a big help, too. Being able to talk to them in person, rather than e-mail, was very effective because sometimes information can be misinterpreted through text. 

Week Seven

Due to our low turnout rate in responses, our time this week was spent encouraging people to participate in the mapping study. Laura gave us a sheet of all the organizations that participated last year. From this sheet, we were able to see who has responded, not responded, and who was missing from our contact list. After adding the missing organizations to our contact list, we sent out emails and made calls to all the organizations on the sheet. With this effort, we now have 90 responses on Survey Monkey and at least 24 additional responses on an Excel spreadsheet. Learning from our experience, we realized we need to provide a variety of methods for organizations to complete the survey. The excel spreadsheet worked well for large organizations with multiple sites, such as Extend-a-Care and YMCA. We gave the opportunity for organizations to complete the survey on a PDF and email it back and via phone interview.

Lessons Learned:

• Initial contact with organizations should be a phone call
• That first email did not produce a lot of responses
• Organizations are more likely to agree to complete the survey once we inform them the information will be included in the 211 database
• Organizations need various ways to complete survey
• Need an incentive to complete the survey

Week Five

This post is pretty late, unfortunately.  However, due to scrupulous note-taking I am pleased to be able to report that during week five as Target Graduation VISTAs at UWATX, we:

• continued following up with survey non-respondents.
• coded and began analyzing data from CTAN surveys of providers and teachers.
• began working on our side projects.

It was the fourth of July week, though, so it was shorter than usual, and very quiet around UWATX.  It was productive, but not particularly remarkable.

Week Four

This week has been pretty busy for us. We have been calling the different organizations on our list trying to get responses for the out-of-school time survey. The survey has been e-mailed to 408 organizations, and we have 56 responses so far. Our goal is to get as many responses as we can with our persistence and drive. Calling people has been somewhat of a challenge and also a learning experience as a whole. With every call, we get a better understanding of how to approach people regarding the survey through a telephone call. Some people have been very friendly while others have been hesitant to provide us information.

Emily, Vanessa, and myself prepared a short slideshow for the Out-of-School Time meeting on Thursday with Laura and other guests. Along with the slideshow, we prepared a document that showcases the organizations we are trying to survey. We then provided information regarding the organizations that are  "dragging their feet", who responded, and who simply did not want to participate.  Overall, I think the meeting went well.

Below is a list of challenges we have been facing with calls and e-mails:

-Getting responses
-Not answering
-Runaround (forward calls)
-Kids in background/very noisy
-Vacation/out of state
-Finding new organizations (no time and challenge getting contact information)
-Sending e-mails and having them get caught in spam/junk mailboxes

Week Three

This week has been productive and fun! Our primary task this week was to contact organizations we were unable to communicate with last week. As of today, we have 38 surveys completed. However, we are currently working with Extend A Care agencies and the YMCA of Austin to get surveys completed for there various sites. We hope to see that number increase significantly with our follow up calls.

We have also begun working on the administrative survey of the CTAN Mapping study. A meeting was held with Laura to overview the childcare survey so that we can tailor the questions to administrative personnel of out-of-school time providers.

Tuesday and Friday was our fun day! Tuesday was eventful with professional development trainings! Our first fun meeting was facilitated by the financial opportunity crew. They held a very interesting, insightful and interactive session on credit. We learned about credit reports, credit scores and how to improve our credit history. The second training was about becoming volunteer project coordinators. Again, we learned a lot about leading volunteer projects in our communities. There are many details the must be considered when coordinating event! Our last meeting was an organization-wide training about learning the functions of other departments at United Way. We learned how the goals of various teams collectively work to achieve the mission of the organization.  Friday we were able to do outreach work with the financial opportunity Vistas. We were given the opportunity to explore Austin while distribute informative flyers about the BankOn campaign. Overall, it was an awesome week!

Week Two

We've done a lot this week.  We helped facilitate the Middle School Matters End of Year Provider Meeting, including typing up notes from that meeting.  We also attended a CTAN meeting and finally got around to creating this blog.  Most significantly, however, we finalized the mapping survey and our scripts for cold calls and emailing people, and we finally got around to sending the survey to people.  We've only gotten eight responses so far, but we've emailed a lot of people and called a lot of people, and hopefully that number will go up soon.

Some preliminary observations:

• A lot of people are asking us to call them back at a later date, possibly because our script doesn't make it clear early on that we're asking them to fill out a survey online and not to stay with us on the phone for thirty minutes.
• We're getting so few responses that I'm wondering if we're getting caught by spam filters--I think that's fairly common when you're sending emails to a lot of people at once.
• There's something weird about the survey--some people aren't sure if they've actually submitted it.
• It seems like two of our respondents skipped almost every question.  At some point we might want to contact them and ask them to rectify this situation.
• A lot of programs are done for the year.  And we just can't get a hold of them.  It would have been really nice to have the survey ready earlier, so that we could start contacting people right away.  It seems like, with a lot of people (Pflugerville elementary schools, for example), contacting them last week would have been right in the nick of time.

Week One

This week is our first week serving as summer time VISTAS at United Way for Greater Austin. What we have been working on so far is getting to know everyone in our group and becoming familiar with our work space. We attended many trainings with our co-workers in order to better understand the work we will be doing this summer. Our main goal is to get the Out-of-School time survey completed and sent out sometime next week. Hopefully, we can all work together to reach our goal. In the mean time, here are some awesome pictures we took with our fellow VISTAS. Updates on the survey will be posted next week!