As a volunteer organization, we depend on our parents to provide us with guidance and recommendations.  And because we are run primarily by volunteers we understand the value of time, and are understanding that you can’t always make suggestions on the fly.  So, we offer surveys to enable us to gain this important feedback that we may continue to improve. We would love for you to read more so you can understand how important your feedback is. 

If you have an athlete who just participated in a spring SYA sport, you likely just received an email from SYA asking for your feedback. (If not, or if you can’t find it, you can participate in the survey here through June 22, 2022.)  

SYA is a volunteer-driven organization. Our coaches, managers, commissioners, and executive leadership are all volunteers who are juggling the obligations of their role with SYA, full-time jobs, families, and everything else they have in their lives including other hobbies and interests.  

Side note: thank you again, to the volunteers who keep SYA running year-round. Without you, there would be no SYA.  

To ensure SYA remains true to our mission, to promote healthy, safe and fun athletic opportunities for the youth of communities of Southwestern Fairfax County, we need feedback from the families that we are serving. While throughout each season, families are welcome to reach out to their coaches, commissioners and SYA leadership with feedback, the end of year surveys gives SYA the opportunity to collect qualitative and quantitative feedback about the organization and each of the sport through a single lens.  

Also of note, these surveys are powered by google forms to allow parents to provide unfiltered and anonymous feedback. If parents wish to be contacted about feedback, they are welcome to share their contact information.  

Within each survey, families are asked how likely they would be to recommend SYA to a family member, friend or neighbor on a scale of 0-10, if there is a reason for this answer, and if they have any other feedback they would like to share. From there, the same questions are asked for the sports their athletes participated in, and how this season may have compared to previous seasons.  

After the survey closes, SYA dives into the data.  

Any feedback that has requested a response, is elevated to the appropriate person with the organization. From our quantitative questions, ratings on a scale from 0-10, are converted to a Net Promoter Score, NPS, that SYA can track season to season and year to year.  

The feedback from our qualitative questions, reasons for their answers and general feedback, are reviewed and tagged to track the frequency of terms used. For example, throughout the past year, we heard a lot about communication, and registration fees, and throughout the winter we’ve heard more about facility closures.  

With the numbers crunched and feedback analyzed, the SYA marketing manager delivers a quarterly report to the SYA leadership and commissioners during one of our monthly board meetings. This report includes the NPS scores for SYA, the key themes about the overall season, as well as the key themes from each of the sports. Throughout the report we’re able to feature what is working well across different SYA programs, where there is opportunity to learn from the strengths of each program, and where we as an organization need to focus on improving overall. Reports for individual reports are sent to the commissioners following this meeting.  

The use of the survey information doesn’t stop there. Over the course of the past few months, we’ve been answering the questions asked in these surveys in the SYA Blog, SYA Newsletter and on Facebook. For example, you can learn more about why registration opens so early, and where your registration fees go online now.