The Mountaineers
Every two years, we invited our current, past, and future members and volunteers to participate in a community survey. We use your responses to help understand the needs of our community and to learn where we need to allocate more resources. Based on your feedback, we’ve launched Alpine Ambassadors, the Leadership Development Series, and our Equity & Inclusion work in the last five years.
We've benefited from a high response rate for each survey, and we need your help to keep that up! Current members in good standing should have received a personalized invite in their inboxes from Alchemer already, but we know emails are put through the gauntlet to get to your inbox. And, all people in our community are encouraged to participate in our survey regardless of membership status.
The survey will be open until 11:59pm on Sunday, February 13, 2022. We want your feedback whether you are a current, future, or past member or volunteer with The Mountaineers, part of the greater outdoor community, or just someone who just found our about us. Please take 6-12 minutes to offer your feedback.
Past Survey Results
We started conducting membership trackers in the late 90s, and made the process formal with an org-wide survey in 2011. We followed it up with very similar surveys in 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 to help us understand changes over time. We also launched a special Volunteer survey in 2015 with the intent of running it on alternative years to the member survey, but in the end it made the most sense to combine it, which we did for the first time in 2018.
Here's a quick historical recap of our findings:
- Based on the full 2014 Membership Survey Results, we invested in a new Leadership Development Manager position to support volunteers, hired a Communications Specialist to improve our communications support for conservation and branches, and got approval for an additional investment in technology from the board.
- Our 2015 Volunteer Survey showed that our volunteers were generally satisfied, but that the admin work associated with volunteering was draining. Due in part to these responses, we created the Progressive Climbing Education process and added additional staff support for our volunteers. Supporting was called out as a critical priority in our Vision 2022 Strategic Plan.
- In the 2016 Membership Survey, we learned that the the majority of members maintained the marked improvement in satisfaction, and that we have opportunities through continued focus on equity and belonging, on improving processes and transparency to remove "red tape", and on increasing course and activity offerings to give people even more opportunities to explore the outdoors, improve skills, and protect the places where we play.
- Our combined 2018 Member & Volunteer Survey identified key factors to renewal and the importance of personal leadership development opportunities for volunteers. The 2018 survey also provided further support for the areas of work we designed in our Vision 2022 Strategic Plan: to LEAD innovation in outdoor education, ENGAGE future Mountaineers, and ADVOCATE fiercely for our wild places.
- Our 2020 Member & Volunteer Survey wrapped in February 2020, right before the pandemic stopped us in our tracks. We took immediate austerity measures, and are happy to be thriving today. The results again mirrored the importance of key programs supporting Vision 2022, some of which have launched in the last two years: Alpine Ambassadors, Break Camps, Carbon Footprint Reduction Committee, Climb Leader Progression, Equity & Inclusion Committee, Leadership Development Series Seminars, Mini Mountaineers, Mountain Education Alliance, Outdoor Alliance and Outdoor Alliance Washington (new!), and the Public Lands 101 eLearning Course.
We appreciate the thoughtful feedback shared with us during this process. We hope you are as excited about the future as we are!
