SMDA Member Survey – Discussion of Results

October 2009

Early this fall, SMDA emailed a survey to all members, asking for your opinions about our club. The response was terrific with almost 40% of you taking the time to complete the survey. Thanks for all the feedback and your thoughtful comments.

We want to share the results and plans for acting on these results:

• Your feedback: The Hollis and Pineland schooling shows were a success, with 86% (Hollis) and 100% (Pineland) rating them as satisfactory or very satisfactory. A very large proportion of you had one suggestion for improving these shows however – add more slots for rides.
  
  Plans for 2010: In addition to our four schooling shows at the Hollis Equestrian Park, Pineland will be affiliating with SMDA for two additional shows (in April and October). This will give our club members SIX opportunities to ride and accumulate year-end points.


• Your feedback: The Ride Re-Ride show was not as well-accepted as the schooling shows, with many more people dissatisfied with this event.
  
  Plans for 2010: We will not be holding a Ride Re-Ride event in 2010. Instead, we heard that many of you wanted more clinics. Next year, we are investigating having at least 2 clinics/symposia; a symposium with Linda Zang and a clinic focusing on Intro and Training level riders. Stay tuned for more information on these events!


• More feedback and plans:

a. Almost 75% of you told us that email is the way to go with club communication. Therefore, we’ll be moving to email only, with 2010 being our transition year with all communications going by both email and US postal service.

b. While 92% of you have visited our web site and like it, we did hear that you wanted it updated more regularly – more pictures, ride times posted sooner, and the current newsletter posted. We are putting together a team to address these issues and hope to have more information to share soon.

c. Finally, many of you were interested in having SMDA sponsor some new events such as saddle-fitting, photo/video sessions, or behavior clinics. While we cannot add all these new events at once, we are investigating ways to add some of these events – perhaps as early as next year. Stay tuned for more information!

For those that are interested in learning the results of the survey in more detail, please click on the following link to see the full summary: Word Doc | PDF