Turning a supporter survey into a work plan
Volunteer analysis, Statistics Without Borders Confidential survey dataA one-person climate advocacy nonprofit had 89 supporter responses and no analyst or technical team. I turned the open-ended feedback into a reviewable set of themes, three practical recommendations, and a follow-on website audit ordered by implementation effort.
Engagement evidence
Volunteer analysis delivered through Statistics Without Borders in 2026. The client is anonymized at its request.
Survey scope
89 Total responses reviewed, including both structured questions and open-ended feedback.Website evidence
26 Substantive website comments, 23 from respondents who had actually visited the site.Decision output
3 Recommendations tied to observed theme counts instead of personal design preference.Evidence and confidentiality note. The source workbook, client name, and verbatim comments are not published. Distinctive phrasing could identify a respondent in an organization this small, so only aggregate counts and reproducible technical measurements appear here.
The decision
The quantitative survey questions were straightforward to count. The harder part was dozens of paragraphs of supporter feedback that the organization had no capacity to read, code, and translate into a practical work plan.
The question was not simply what people said. It was what one staff member should do next, with no analyst, technical team, or budget for either.
My contribution
I coded every open-ended response into themes and kept each coding decision in a reviewable file. I separated conclusions supported by the responses from areas that were too mixed to carry the same weight.
I then converted the themes into recommendations, ran a separate technical review of the website, and ordered the fix list by effort so the client could see which high-impact changes took minutes and which required a larger block of work.
What the survey supported
Fifty-eight of 89 respondents, or 65.2 percent, had visited the website. The 26 substantive website comments were coded into seven themes.
| Theme | Comments |
|---|---|
| Positive value and satisfaction | 10 |
| Content clarity, depth, and impact | 5 |
| Navigation, findability, and usability | 5 |
| Freshness and timeliness | 5 |
| Events and engagement tools | 3 |
| Visual, mobile, and technical design | 1 |
| Limited familiarity | 1 |
Recommendations
- Improve freshness and findability. Five comments concerned stale content and five concerned navigation, from respondents who had used the site.
- Make impact easier to see. Supporters wanted clearer evidence of what the organization had accomplished, suggesting recurring outcome measures published on a schedule.
- Make engagement easier. Positive sentiment was the largest single theme at 38.5 percent, but the next step for turning goodwill into action was not obvious.
Follow-on website audit
The survey pointed toward the website, so I measured the technical conditions behind the general comments.
- Form accessibility: 5 of 8 homepage inputs lacked a programmatic label.
- Color contrast: three interface elements failed the 4.5:1 requirement; the worst measured 1.47:1.
- Heading structure: the homepage contained 54 headings, roughly 50 of them names and only four actual content sections.
- Page weight: one homepage load made 205 network requests and transferred 691 KB of images.
Two of the three highest-impact fixes were in the roughly ten-minute effort category. That ordering made the review usable by a one-person organization instead of leaving it with an undifferentiated defect list.
Limits
The thematic analysis was exploratory. Theme membership was not mutually exclusive, and ten comments were mixed or did not fit one category cleanly. The counts are useful for prioritization, not a population estimate.
This engagement produced recommendations and a technical fix list. It did not include implementation or a post-change measurement, so the case study does not claim improved engagement, accessibility, or performance outcomes.
The client was satisfied with its recent redesign and had not asked for another one. I framed the findings as measurable maintenance work, using supporter data and reproducible checks rather than asking the client to accept my taste.
Want this for your business?
Through Scott Campbell Consulting I take on data cleanup, dashboards and recurring reporting for small businesses and agencies.