Business Disability Forum

Business Disability Forum (BDF) is a not-for-profit membership organisation which has over 500 members, mostly businesses, but also some charities and statutory sector organisations.

BDF haven’t run a membership survey in 4 years but were developing their next 5-year plan and wanted robust membership input. The results of the survey would also help them to improve their marketing to recruit new members.

The Questionnaire had been written and Matter were asked to:

• Input to improve the questionnaire, increase response rates, get the data needed most effectively – flow, length, suggested edits to questions or question formats used, user experience
• Script, test and host the survey
• Provide data analysis (including data tables) and a summary report including open ended question analysis

BDF was also keen to ensure that the survey was as accessible as possible. To this end we produce both a ‘standard’ and plain text version of the survey, both accessed via the same email invite, with the ability to navigate between both versions.

The plain text version complied with the WCAG 2.1 guidelines. Checkboxes were arranged in a single column and code labels are placed to the right of the checkbox which helps screen readers correctly associate labels with code boxes. Grid questions were also expanded to single columns to make it easier for assistive technologies to navigate and routing was simplified to further aid navigation.

In addition colour was removed to again make the survey easier to read, fonts size was kept to a minimum of 12pt, and verbal rather than visual rating scales were used.

BDF also offered the option to complete the survey verbally and made hard copy and hard copy large print versions available on request.

In total over 20% of members responded to the survey. Excel data tables and a PowerPoint summary were created and presented back to the BDF leadership team.