an opportunity beckons

like idiots, perlmonger and I a) got involved in the Parish Plan committee, and b) offered to do the data analysis. “How hard could it be?” we asked ourselves … it’s just some mySQL and some web forms.

we took it over to the Clerk to the Parish Council a few weeks ago, to show her how it worked, and she got in someone from Community Action to sit in (they fund Parish Plans in the County Formerly Known As Avon). They were both hugely impressed with it, and said that there was almost certainly a potentially very big market for it.

so we bought a domain and stuck some text on it, and ParishplanSurveys.co.uk was born.

we’re very slowly developing the software – here in Long Ashton, there are 1600 surveys with 110 questions each, plus the Young People’s one, so data entry will take a while, and we haven’t done anything about analysing it yet.

but now we must – we have been invited by Community Action to demonstrate it to a group of ten Parish Councils, all of whom are fretting about how to deal with their data. And this is on 24th May [scream].

there are 10,000 parish councils in England and Wales. And these surveys typically get done every five years. If we could get just 10% of that market, I’d be very happy indeed.

[returns to coding]

9 thoughts on “an opportunity beckons”

  1. And they have money.

    You probably ought to talk to data entry firms about what they want for keying. Our PP survey was small enough that I did the data entry myself – 60ish households, 120ish people and 55 questions each, but it’s one place people look to spend money.

    And then there’s analysis, and the interpretion of the results…

      1. I’ve heard that it’s horrible to use, and of course it’s £75 per *user*, so if you have a lot to do, it works out pricy.

        we’re thinking of charging £250 per council, and let them enter their own questions, etc.

        1. Nope – follow the link and it says:

          The Cost

          The cost of this package is £75.00. Extra licences are available at £30.00 each. A separate licence is required for each separate village or community for which an appraisal is undertaken using Village Appraisals for Windows software. Extra manuals may also be purchased for £7.00 each.

          So it’s 75 quid for the first community and 30 quid for each subsequent one. I had an exchange with them, as Coveney Parish has two or three villages within it, and they decided they only wanted one fee.

          Horrible to use is pretty accurate, though. ISTR our original budget was £300 for software, so your £250 is right in the ballpark.

          Would you be interested in a copy of their question set? It was valuable for us as a set of prompts, rather than because we used the exact wording. Indeed, the actual questionnaires were Word files, so some of the questions didn’t have much resemblance to the originals. Which just meant that I had to remember to fix up the output to match what we’d asked…

          1. Would you be interested in a copy of their question set?

            oh, yes please – that’d be great. if you could send it to mac at webhorus dot net …

            and thanks for all the info.

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