On balance, do you believe the football club is or is not better located at the County Ground rather than (e.g.) on the outskirts of Swindon? yes no
Now there's a fucking badly worded question.
It's not great is it?
How about:
Do you believe the football club is better located at the County Ground rather than (e.g.) on the outskirts of Swindon?
Yes, better at the County Ground
No, prefer edge of town/out of town
In fact, the whole thing could have been thought about a little more thoroughly.
In what way? Seriously, if there's stuff you think's missing or needs doing better, let us know. We've tried to get a balance between extracting enough information to be useful and something that can be quickly completed on a clipboard stood outside the ground/in the pub etc
The only point I felt could do with clarifying was between the first two questions of section 2. I believe the intention is to illustrate that a non town-centre based stadium would lead to a reduction in potential revenue brought to the town centre as a result of people attending football matches. This is a fair-enough point, and worth highlighting (I believe that the location of the county-ground is one of its biggest assets).
Fair point, and I agree wholeheartedly that the CG's location is one of its biggest assets. We're not looking to "make a case" as such in the survey form itself - in fact if the questions aren't fairly neutral then that would undermine the value of any survey. The idea is when we present the results of the survey, that is where we would "make the case", using the figures gained from survey to back it up.
However I visit the town-centre for non-football and non-work reasons around 150 times a year making the second question redundant,
You may do but a significant proportion of our fanbase don't. Last time we had figures on it over 60% of season ticket holders were from outside Swindon and even people who live in Swindon don't necessarily go to the town centre that often. It's a legitimate point you make - if you'd visit the town centre a lot without STFC then it makes more sense to phrase the question as you suggest, if you wouldn't, then the way we've put it makes more sense (I think, anyway).
What we're trying to do ultimately is make the questions as simple and as quick to answer as we can while still getting useful information so we can prove to council etc - "look if we lose the club from the CG, then these x-thousand people are either never going to visit the town centre or will make x-thousand less visits, resulting in x million quid a year lost from the town's economy", much as you pointed out.
We've had a fair bit of feedback this week on the questions and it's fair to say there's areas we can improve on (for example, there's also an ambigiuity as to whether the "total spend" is supposed to include money spent on tickets, in the ground etc or whether it's just money spent in town centre - different people have taken it different ways). That's why we did last night's "clipboard survey" as a trial as much as anything. We picked up a lot of useful feedback from that and from forums like this, so cheers, BR, and everyone else who's come to back to us and said where we can improve it. We won't make it to everyone's total satisfaction (you never can) but hopefully we can come up with the simplest possible set of questions that will still give us the answers we need.
If I have completely missed the point then I apologise!
Nope, seems to me you've got it completely! Thanks again for the feedback.
