It is crucial to continue to seek regular feedback and maintain an open dialogue with diverse communities so that you understand their needs and motivations. By building and maintaining strong relationships, you will be well placed to gather useful feedback which will help you to adapt or modify programs as required, and to make positive changes within your sport's culture and environment to ensure everyone is welcomed and included.
Feedback is important if you want to understand why something isn’t working. New programs often take a while to build, and if you’re not getting the uptake you want, the best thing you can do is gather direct feedback from participants, or community leaders, and use the conversation to adapt your sport activities.
- Consider taking 5 minutes at the end of your session to speak to the participants about what they liked, or didn’t like, about the session.
- Speak to the leaders from the community you are working with. This could include organisation leaders, leaders of faith based organisations or prominent members of a specific community.
Remember, listening to feedback is very important and might provide invaluable information to help you tailor your activities to match the interests of the local community.
You could use a free resource like Survey Monkey to help design and distribute a survey. The Club Help website offers three surveys that you can adapt to construct your survey:
Surveys can help you find out more about who lives in your local community, their general interests and sport participation levels. Use this information to identify relevant activities and opportunities for your sport to engage the community and make improvements to what you are already doing. Make sure you consider providing surveys in other languages or in easy English.
If you want to find these organisations in your area, the Victorian Multicultural Commission has a community directory here.