On a hot late summer’s day the Penmachno Funday is held, a village tradition that has been bringing the community together for over 50 years. Much like other traditional British fetes it features a range of community activities from a duck race to homemade refreshments, a tug of war and the famous annual fancy dress competition.
This presented a great opportunity to gauge the impact and perception of the Oriel Machno gallery and creative hub by a wide range of villagers. We employed a simple survey tool, in both Welsh and English, to gather a range of data. The creative challenge was how we could utilise Funday activities to increase the rate of engagement. For this we created a community raffle that could be entered by completing a survey, with a range of prizes from local businesses.
The survey was developed in order to understand how our intervention was achieving the impact ‘Increased appreciation of local culture and identity’ as well as more general metrics on the challenges faced in the village. The aim is to repeat the survey annually to see how the results may change.
On reflection, the tool was quite successful as it led to a high number of survey responses in a small amount of time. More traditional survey methods such as door knocking or asking passersby can be difficult when working in rural spaces with a low population density.
We were pleased to see overwhelming agreement with the statement ‘I have learnt more about local culture through Oriel Machno’, with 62.5% of responses strongly agreeing. Furthermore, all the responses from those who lived outside the village either strongly agreed or agreed with the statement.
One issue found is that 44 out of 49 responses were from those aged over 30. It is worth noting that this could be because younger audiences were less inclined to take part in a raffle, so this could have led to a skew in the responses. In order to measure the opinions of young people, a different approach may be needed in future.
Overall we are satisfied with the experiment and look forward to organising another raffle survey at the next Penmachno Funday.