Let's collect and share feedback at our events - not just fixing data!

How to repair in your community
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:left_speech_bubble: “It gives me hope for humanity” - Exeter, Devon

For the last few months, a group of us have been working on ways to collect feedback from the people who come to repair events that will help us measure wider impacts of our work, beyond the fix.

We’ve developed a couple of easy-to-use tools that we’re excited for groups in the UK to try.

Ideally you can use both tools below at your events, each helps in a different way. One helps collect basic demographic data about participants (which we will share with groups), and informs them about necessary policy changes we need to keep products longer. The other gives people a chance to leave motivating, heart-felt feedback for you and your volunteers.

To give you a flavour of the kind of feedback we’ve already seen, here are some more examples:

:left_speech_bubble: “Absolutely delighted that my 1970s Walkman was fixed today! How important it is that manufacturers take repairability on board in future products” - Crediton, Devon

:left_speech_bubble: “Great advice on how I can deal with something undesirable with my kettle (and that turned out to be an intentional feature). Thanks!" - Hackney, London

:left_speech_bubble: “Thanks so much. Microphone fixed and learned some great soldering tips.” - Kilburn, London

:left_speech_bubble: “Brilliant! Discovered our solar light has batteries that are replaceable. Will change them and keep using the light.” - Loughborough, Leicestershire

We will be campaigning to collect feedback across the UK for the rest of 2019. We’ll be reporting back on how it’s going, and how we continue to learn from this. And participation in this will be part of our criteria for a free trip to Fixfest 2019, in Berlin in September. hint, hint

We’ve included here a quick intro to each tool, what it’s for and how you can implement it at an event.

Please :heart: this post if you intend on joining us in this campaign with your group.

:bulb: While these have been designed with simplicity in mind, so that any host can set these up, they would really benefit from extra hosting volunteers. Please consider recruiting a “feedback and data” volunteer to help collect feedback and log repair data.

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:whiskers_left: Visitors book :whiskers_right:

Collect feedback from people at events using a visitors’ book. Use the bookmark downloadable resource and “emoji” stickers to prompt people with ideas for feedback. (Any group around the world is welcome to use this tool :earth_americas:)

bookmarks.pdf (493.6 KB)
emoji_stickers.pdf (184.5 KB)

Set up

  • Buy a book or make one out of reused paper.
  • Print the bookmarks, give them a bit of colour with a marker pen, keep in the book.
  • Print “emoji” stickers on pre-formatted sticker paper (40mm round labels, 24/sheet), or draw your own emoji stickers, based on ours.
    Stickers-very-small

Before the event

  • Place the book in a visible spot at your event.
  • Mark the next available page with the bookmark.
  • Write the place and date of your event in the book, on each page used.

During

  • Point it out to people – “Don’t forget to put something in our visitors’ book before you leave”.
  • If possible, literally point people to the prompts on the bookmark.
  • If people are too in a hurry to write a comment, encourage them to pick an “emoji” sticker that represents their experience. (Or draw their own!)

After

  • Have a read. Find out what people are saying about your events.
  • Take photos of the comments. (Please redact personally identifiable info!)
  • When entering repair data for your event, take a moment to upload the photos of the comments to the Fixometer
Click/tap here to see how to upload photos

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Use “Event actions -> Request contributions” to share them with all volunteers that attended. (We will improve this process ASAP.)

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:whiskers_left: The quiz :whiskers_right:

This will help us collect basic data from participants and give them some interesting questions to test their knowledge while they wait. (This tool is UK-only at the moment :uk:)

:link: http://rstrt.org/quiz

quiz poster.pdf (320.2 KB)

Set up

  • Take it yourself first so that you have an idea of what it’s like!
  • Print out the quiz poster resource.
  • Decide if you have a spare laptop / tablet that people can use.

Before the event

  • Put up the quiz poster in a prominent place, or many places. Perhaps on a table in your “lounge” area.
  • Set up the laptop / tablet (if you are providing one).
  • Put up information about the Wifi network – if you can.

During

  • Point it out to people – “Take our quiz while you wait”.

After

The Restart team will download results from the quiz and share them with you annually so you can see how people in your city or county answered in relation to people nationally.

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Thanks to @Repair_Cafe_Glasgow @James_Diamond @Dave @Marie_Lefebvre @Ian_Barnard @Ruth_Leonard-Williams @Sarah_Maloy @Sophia_Flucker the members who helped us design these resources and gave us really strong feedback and great ideas.

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Hello! We have 150-200 feedback responses to add to our Fixometer account. Is the preferred way to take pictures of them and add them as per @Janet’s drop down menu above? Or is there a place to copy/paste text? This is a going to be a great collection of information! Jon @Repair_Cafe_Glasgow

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Wow, Jon. Many questions!

What form are they currently in? Hand-written or digital? :slight_smile:

Do you use a book or a form?

How many events’ worth does 150-200 represent?

Thanks!

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@neil Collected these over the weekend - we’ll have stickers for the next one :slight_smile:

Goodlife%20Centre%20feedback
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Feedback was received at our event on Saturday :slight_smile:

The prompts don’t seem to work - people just really want to say thank you.

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Our data stems from collecting it on hand written forms over 14+ events in the last 14 months. It’s amazing that we have a good budget for our Repair Cafe, yet we struggle to keep up with all the different elements of running one or two events per month. We have had some difficulty recruiting someone for the data collection/processing as it’s not super fun, and I have been remiss at doing it myself! We are sitting on a mine of data and one day we will get around to digging through it and finding the treasures (cheeeeeesy analogy I know)!!!

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Usually I literally wave the bookmarks in front of people and ask them to answer the questions. But as you can see from other attempts, often people do just really want to say thank you :wink:

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Victoria from Brighton Repair Cafe told us the same thing… Perhaps if we can actively use the testimonials and thanks, and show how motivating they are to fixers, recruiting a volunteer for this might be easier?

Perhaps by that time, we will have done some experimenting with optical character recognition and coding of this kind of data! :nerd_face:

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Yeah I tried that too :slight_smile:

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Thanks to @katie and @Peter_Ramsey for using the Quiz :clap: ! At least we think you did, we’ve got answers from Bedfordshire and Belfast. Hoping they are real?

To all others, please don’t forget to print out the posters and convince people to take the quiz! It’s proving helpful to gauge motivations of participants and their level of knowledge about the issues. We’ll share some preliminary data once we get more answers.

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sorry Janet, which quiz- I recently filled in one about the podcasts, and that’s it!

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Quiz is featured in the post above :slight_smile: - we’d love it if you could promote it, as it helps raise awareness about the right to repair. (I guess it was a test response, as “B” comes towards the top of the drop-down.)

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ah I see. wasn’t me, must have been a test!

we are currently using survey monkey to contact people after our events. Luckily I have someone who serves tea (important job) but she also knows about writing surveys and helped us set ours up, and wants to do on-the-day surveys too. The aim for this is to build stats in order to bid for funding should we want to in the future.

Do the organisers get to see the stats you collect at our events? I wouldn’t want to throw two surveys at our participants, but I’m sure there’s some sort of GDPR breach if we share information.

Do you specifically want only participants to use the quiz on the day of Fixing, rather than us share on social media ?

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Sounds like you are ahead of us! Agree that duplication is probably not a great idea.

We will share anonymised data from your location, but we don’t have a way to do it yet in realtime. We are aiming to share twice a year.

We think it’s valuable to give people something to do while they wait. And ask them to think about the barriers to repair while they are focused on repairing.