The Responsible Sports Season Evaluation Tool, developed in partnership with the experts at Positive Coaching Alliance, allows leagues and teams to solicit feedback from parents on their child’s youth sports experience. Through this free, online easy-to-use tool, administrators can gain valuable insights into parents overall satisfaction and identify areas to be celebrated as well as areas of improvement. By providing a structured and formal process for parents to provide feedback and establishing an evaluation culture for coaches and administrators, organizations find greater cohesion and overall a more positive, Responsible Sports environment.
Learn more about the Responsible Sports Season Evaluation:
Why Survey?
Establishing a survey and evaluation process can be extremely helpful for a youth sport organization.
- Demonstrates a commitment to communication and feedback
- Helps reinforce the shared core values of Responsible Sports
- Provides a constructive forum for parent feedback
- Leverages positive feedback to retain and recognize coaches
- Provides quantitative and qualitative data points on key issues to support future actions
Who Are The Experts?
Liberty Mutual is proud to partner with Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) to help develop the Season Evaluation Tool. PCA is a non-profit youth sport organization dedicated to transforming youth sports so sports can transform youth. Through partnerships with more than 1000 youth sport organizations, leagues, schools and cities nationwide together with partnerships with national youth sports organizations, PCA has conducted nearly 10,000 workshops for coaches, parents and youth sports administrators. In addition, Executive Director Jim Thompson has published several books on the topics of positive youth sports including
The Double-Goal Coach,
Shooting in the Dark: Tales of Coaching and Leadership and
Positive Sports Parenting: How “Second-Goal” Parents Raise Winners in Life Through Sports among others.
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Who Can Survey?
The Season Evaluation Tool is designed to allow you to survey your entire organization or a portion of your organization.
- Coaches of a single team can survey this season's the roster of parents.
- Division coordinators can survey the parents of all teams in the division, learning more about, for example, the U-8 division.
- A league administrator can survey all divisions to learn how the league did this past season as well as drill down on the details for each division and team.
- And finally, large youth sport organizations can survey all parents across multiple sports, divisions and teams.
What Topics Are Surveyed?
The Season Evaluation survey, designed by the experts at Positive Coaching Alliance, surveys parents in six key areas:
- Key Safety Measures
- Facilities and Equipment
- Coaching For Mastery
- Filling Players Emotional Tanks
- Honoring The Game
- Organization Communication
Within each of these six areas, parents are asked to respond whether they strongly agree or disagree with a series of statements.
At the end of the survey, parents are asked to respond to a custom question posed by your organization. And finally, parents are given an opportunity to provide any additional feedback in an open comment box.
View an example of the
The Season Evaluation Survey
>>
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How Does The Survey Work For Parents?
Once your organization administrator has set up a survey and scheduled the send, emails are automatically sent to the list of parent email addresses you provide. The parent receives an email with a link to your survey and they complete the survey online. After they complete the survey, they'll receive an email confirmation, thanking them for their participation. A reminder email message is sent to those parents who have not yet completed the survey by seven days before the close of the survey.
Your parents will not receive any additional communication. Email addresses are not stored for any marketing purposes and your parents will not be contacted further. We take your privacy and the privacy of your parents seriously. Please read our privacy policy statement.
Parents will only be allowed the complete the survey once, unless the parent has multiple children participating and that is noted by the administrator during survey design.
Parents responses are confidential and anonymous. At no time will an administrator be able to access the individual responses of a parent or match responses to email addresses.
Unfortunately, at this time it is not possible for a parent to complete an independent survey. At this time, surveys are only available when an administrator initiates the process.
Do I need to register?
Yes, you’ll need to register first as the individual administrator, and then you’ll be asked to register your organization. If you’ve participating in our Community Grant program in the past, you organization may already be registered.
To get started, you’ll need to first register for a Fan Account on ResponsibleSports.com You’ll be asked to set up your profile with your first name, last name, and your email address. You’ll create a password and together with your email address, you’ll be able to log back in to the system at any time.
Once your individual account is established, you’ll need to register your organization. The registration is quick and easy. The registration form includes information about your organization including organization name, city and state, sport, number of players and age ranges.
Your organization does have to be approved before continuing. Why? Responsible Sports is designed for youth sport organizations only and we closely monitor each registration to that only youth sport organizations are participating. Sorry, at this time this tool is not available for adult sport organization or non-sport organization.
How Do Administrators Create A Survey?
Setting up a survey could not be easier and the Season Evaluation Tool walks you through each of the steps along the way. We’ll outline the steps here as an overview. Once you’re actually building your survey, you’ll notice help icons throughout that will give you even further information. And at any time, you can email team@responsiblesports.com for more help.
Setting up a survey is done in six steps:
1. Name Your Survey
In this first step, you’ll give a name to your survey. Keep in mind that this will be the name you’re your parents will see when they receive the survey. So we encourage to spell out the name of your organization and make your name clear so that parents will recognize it. We also recommend adding the date to the title. That allows you to differentiate this survey from a future survey you may do at a different time.
The name of this survey will also be what you as the Administrator see when you log back into the Tool and want to review progress or results.
Some suggestions for survey names are: Fall 2009 Littleton Park and Recreation, Fall 2009 Littleton Youth Soccer, Fall 2009 Littleton U-8 Soccer or Fall 2009 Littleton Tigers.
2. Add your Groups (Sports, Divisions, and Teams)
In this step, you’ll be able to enter in your sports, divisions and teams to allow you the opportunity to sort your data when you see the results. In the example above of the Fall 2009 Littleton Park and Recreation example, the Season Evaluation Tool will allow you to add multiple sports (soccer, football, hockey, softball, etc), multiple divisions (u-6, U-8, U-10, etc), and multiple teams (Tigers, Lions, Bears, Panthers, etc.).
While this step is optional, we strongly encourage you to take the time to add your groups. By adding groups, you’ll be able to sort results by teams, divisions and sports to better understand both the positive results as well as the true areas of opportunity.
3. Upload Your List
The next step is to upload the list of your parents and their email addresses. You’ll need to upload the list of parents in a Comma Separated Value ( .CSV) file format. (If you don’t know what this is or how to do it, don’t worry. When you reach this step, we’ll walk you through the steps to create and save a .csv file.) Your parent list will include email address, first name, last name and the number of children participating in your organization.
Why do we ask for the number of children? Because parents can complete two surveys, for example, for their two children who play Littleton Soccer and who may have had different experiences.
Once you have the data entered, then simply save your Excel file in a CSV format and upload to the system. (During your upload process, if you don’t know how to save a file as a CSV file, simply click the help button and we’ll walk you through it step-by-step.
Once you upload your list, you’ll have a chance to review it and make changes.
4. Add a Custom Question
The survey tool allows you to add a custom, open-ended question for your parents to provide specific feedback. Custom questions could include questions such as: “What type of fundraiser would you like us to participate in next year?” or “What do you think of the new Snack Stand at Granger Field?” or “Would you be interested in a summer training camp? If so, what would you hope for your child to improve on during camp?”
We would encourage you to not ask a question that is personal in nature regarding an individual on the field or in your overall organization.
5. Review and Edit Your Survey
In the Review and Edit step, you’ll have a chance to see how everything comes together. You’ll see your survey name at the top, the custom question in place, and you’ll see how the overall survey will look to your parents.
6. Send Your Survey
Your last step is to send the survey. You can choose to send the survey immediately or schedule the survey to be sent on a specific day. You can also choose how long to allow your parents to respond – 3, 4 or 5 weeks. Once sent, your parents will be able to complete the survey online and an automatic reminder will go out to any parent who has not responded within 7 days of your finish date.
That’s it. The Season Evaluation Tool walks you through each of these steps.
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What will my results look like?
Once your survey is complete, you’ll receive a notification to log in and review your results.
You’ll see a results report that will show you the average score for each individual question along with a total score for each of the six areas of the survey. Each survey section will also include a recommendation based on your organization’s results. These recommendations will also include links to resource areas specifically related to your outcomes.
You can view this report online, print the report, or download a copy.
If you entered your sports, divisions and teams, you can sort the results by each of the groups to see how your results may differ across the various groups. For example, you may learn that parents of the U-12 division believe facilities and equipment are good, while parents in the U-8 group believe this is an area for improvement. Or you may learn that soccer parents feel their coaches are reinforcing a mastery approach, whereas football parents feel this may be an area for growth.
What can I do with my results?
As you well know, surveys are only as good as the actions to take with the results you receive. Here are some suggestions for what to do with your results:
- Send an email to all of your parents thanking them for their participation and sharing the results with them
- Create a Next Season Action Plan of steps you will implement next year to address your areas of improvement
- Develop a Coaching Job Description that includes the qualities outlined in the Season Evaluation. Share the job description with not only the coaches but also the parents to set expectations. Then conduct the survey again next season to see if both behavior by the coaches and recognition of the behavior by the parents improve.
- Distribute a Goals Statement to all parents in the pre-season that outlines your vision for each of the six areas of the survey and then let them know that you’ll be seeking their input on these six areas at the end of the season
- Keep surveying. By conducting the survey each season or each year, you’ll begin to notice trends of improvement or can spot areas that may be slipping.
How Do I Get Started?
Season Evaluation Tool Registration >>
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