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!