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Moderated e-mail conference on small farms and food security

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Wed, 16 May 2018 13:15:29 +0000
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Dear all,

After our e-conference, we did a short survey to assess how you, the participants, experienced the e-conference, and to collect your suggestions to further refine or improve our future e-conferences.

I promised you the summary of the survey feedback, which we also presented in our last week's close-out webinar. So for those who could not participate in the webinar, below is the overview of the survey outcome.

But first, a big THANK you for your active participation, once again: 167 participants filled in the survey form. As facilitators, Fiona and I also work on other online consultation projects, online discussion groups and with other Communities of Practice.. But from the start, we have been amazed (and very pleasantly surprised) by the way so many of you actively and constructively participated in our e-conference, during our last week's webinar, and yet again, in this survey. You were all a pleasure to work with and you made this a worth-while and positive process! Thank you!

OK, back to business - the survey outcome summary, by survey question, interlaced with my comments:

1/ Did you participate also in the 1st e-conference?

42% yes

58% no

>>>This question was relevant for us to gage, if your feedback can be read in perspective of your experience in the 1st e-conference (or not). The outcome showed that a slight majority (58%) only joined as of the 2nd e-conference.

2/ Have you provided input during the 2nd e-conference?

58% yes

42% no

>>>This question was relevant to us, to value the feedback and appreciation scores: to see if even those who did not provide actual input during the e-conference, still appreciated/valued the process. So, clearly from the answers below, it seems that most of the non-contributors also valued the process very positively.

3/ Stakeholder groups (for those who answered the survey)

Small farms and small food businesses 16%

Consumers 1%

Other food chain actors excluding consumers (cooperatives, retailers. Input providers, processors, caterers etc.) 5%

Policy-makers and administrators 6%

Research, education, and advisory services 52%

Civil society, NGOs (farmer or consumer NGOs and those dealing with small farms and food issues, local initiative groups, local informal civil society leaders etc.) 15%

General public 2%

Media 1%

>>> This question was to evaluate if the distribution amongst stakeholder groups for those answering the survey, matched those for the overall e-conference attendance, and indeed, the distribution was very close.

4/ Appreciation of the e-conference

(Scoring: 1 = I do not agree, 2 = I partially disagree, 3 = I neither agree nor disagree, 4 = I partially agree, 5 = I fully agree) (outcome scores= weighed averages)

Individual questions and answer scores:

I found this e-conference useful (either to provide input or read input from others)  -score: 4.61

I learned from others' input during this e-conference  -score: 4.67

I enjoyed this e-conference  -score 4.47

Getting involved in this e-conference was a good use of my time  -score 4.44

The instructions to participate in this e-conference were clear  -score 4.61

My input was processed timely (only answer this question when you provided input during our e-conference)  -score: 4.51

>>> Oh wow.. As facilitators, we did not expect these high scores of appreciation. This is very encouraging for us, to see the process worked well. But it is also encouraging for the entire SALSA team: not only did the SALSA team get valuable input on the topics during the e-conference, but the participants also valued the process itself very positively, and learned while contributing. Double win.


5/ Open question: what did you like the most in this e-conference? (answers are grouped/summarized by us)


- Good to learn from the real on-the-ground experiences, diversity of inputs, inputs from (research) experts as well as from farmers/practitioners, innovative ideas, interactions, quality of input - mentioned by 59%

- How the e-conference was organized/moderated: Prompt responses, the way we could contribute in our own time, the way the discussion was moderated, the daily aggregations, the weekly summaries, how topics were presented, accessibility to the moderator, the fact that no physical meeting was needed and all was done virtually - mentioned by 25%

- The topics were clear, choice of topics was good, interesting, helped small farmers, contributed to the challenges, were of high quality - mentioned by 9%

- It opened up new perspectives/insights for me, I learned - mentioned by 7%

>>>Again, this was really encouraging. While the main purpose of the e-conference was to provide the SALSA team with feedback/input on the topics which were the most relevant for them, still, our secondary goal was to ensure that, while participating, the contributors also appreciated the process, and learned from each other.

6/ Open question: Where can we improve, for a next e-conference?

- It was fine the way it was, I liked the way this was done - mentioned by 30%

>>>Personally, I was positively surprised by this. No matter how much we thought about the process of the e-conference, in our view "nothing is perfect", but still, this high score of people who said "I like it the way it was", is very high, in our view.

- Too many emails or input, too difficult to follow, need more time to digest/contribute, compress the aggregation emails even more, convert input into questions or trim the answers, make the instructions clearer, more summaries, provide a different presentation of inputs - mentioned by 26%

>>> "The amount of data generated" is definitively something we will take into account for the next e-conference, also because the amount/diversity of participants might increase in the future: the balance between the amount of input, ensuring everyone's input is valued and distributed, versus the challenge of keeping the amount of input "digestible" for the participants. Adding more participants might also have us consider "quality of input versus quantity of input". Already during this e-conference, we took a different approach from the past (as we almost doubled the amount of participants, so we received much more input, this time around) and decided early on to aggregate the input per topic on a daily basis, rather than re-distributing every single input. However, for the next e-conference we might consider sending 1 single aggregation per day, with ALL input received that day, for all topics, in one email, for instance).

- We need more real-time interaction (webinar, video, whatsapp, social media), or a different platform for this e-conference, more visual discussion, ability to respond onto one input directly, be able to follow one specific discussion thread, provide better ways for people joining late to catch up - mentioned by 17%

>>> This is really constructive feedback, and definitively something we want to consider. If we want to go more "interactive", we will have to ensure we do not overload the participants, and can still track the input. Part of this feedback also relates to how we present the feedback, in a digestible format -which relates to the previous question too.

- More involvement from developing countries, from the EU or from small farmers, diversify the stakeholders who can give input, advertise the e-conference more widely - mentioned by 9%

>>> Again, real constructive feedback. While in the 1st e-conference, we had mostly academics and researchers participating. We did target, as we spread the announcement, more actual small farmers and on-the-ground practitioners. I do think we can use more "lead time" between the official announcement of the e-conference, and the actual start of the discussions to reach out to a more diversified audience and to engage them. We should definitively have more lead-time, which will also allow us to further diversify our target audiences.

OTHER diversified feedback received:

- Would like to discuss different topics, or organize the topics in a different way, chose the topics in a different way - mentioned by 5%

- Some discussions got off-topic, would like more data-based input, might need to clarify some responses better, introduce the topics better - mentioned by 4%

- Make it clearer how inputs will contribute to the research of SALSA, and what the current findings of SALSA were - mentioned by 3%

- Discuss the topics at a deeper level, concentrate on real solutions/needs/problems, limit the number of topics, concentrate on solutions for small farmers - mentioned by 2%

- Would like multi-language support - mentioned by 2 %

- Can we have a certificate of participation?  - mentioned by 1%

The SALSA/FAO e-conference team is taking your input to heart and will definitively keep this in consideration for the next e-conference.


Once more, thank you for your involvement!


best,

Peter,

for the e-conference team

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