Public services
Community programme registration
Take the place, the guardian and the consent in one pass, so the week before the programme is not spent on the phone.
Why this survey gets sent
“We had 94 names on a spreadsheet and no way to know how many were children, who was allowed to collect them, or which of them we were permitted to photograph. The week before the programme was three of us on the phone.”
A registration is not a list of names; it is the set of facts the supervisor needs on the first morning. Ask for each of them once, at the moment the person is motivated to answer — and ask for nothing you will not actually use.
What is in it
- Participant's name and age group
- Which programme (dropdown)
- A number we can reach today
- Guardian's name and number, if the participant is under 18
- What we should arrange so they can take part (long answer)
- How they heard about it (single response)
- Consent to photography (yes / no)
About 4 min to answer
Community programme registration
About 4 min
How to write this survey
Ask for what the first morning needs
Write the registration questions starting from their end. Picture the supervisor standing in front of thirty participants on the first morning and list what they must already know: who is here, how old they are, whom to call if something happens, and what has to be arranged so a particular person can take part. Every question that survives that test belongs; the rest is curiosity.
Age earns its place twice over. Asked as a group rather than as a date of birth it is quick to answer, it is enough to split the room into sessions, and it tells you in advance how many registrations will need a guardian — the single number that decides how much work the week before the programme turns out to be.
Put the condition inside the question
Two fields carry the guardian: a name and a number. Put the condition in the title of each one — “if the participant is under 18” — rather than leaving it to a note above them. A note is read by the people who did not need it and skipped by the people who did, and an unlabelled guardian field is filled in by adults with their own name.
Leave both optional and check them yourself when you confirm places. An adult registering for themselves should not be stopped by a field that does not apply to them, and a required guardian field is the fastest way to collect a page of dashes. A missing guardian number on a registration that needed one is a two-line message, not a lost place.
Ask what would make attending possible
One open box, worded as an arrangement rather than as a category, gets you more than any checklist will. “Is there anything we should arrange so you can take part?” invites the room reachable by wheelchair, the interpreter, the medicine that has to be kept cold and the child who cannot sit still for an hour — four different situations that no set of tick-boxes would have held.
Keep it optional, keep it short, and then actually read it before the first session. The cost of this question is one line in the summary; the cost of skipping it is a person who arrives, discovers they cannot take part, and never registers again.
Consent is a question, not a clause
Photographs of an activity end up on a poster, in a report to whoever funded it, and on a social account. Ask about that in one plain yes-or-no question at the end of the registration, name what the pictures will be used for, and treat “no” as an ordinary answer rather than an obstacle to be worked around.
Then make the answer usable on the day. A supervisor cannot consult a spreadsheet in the middle of an activity, so the practical shape of this data is a short printed list of the people who said no, carried by whoever holds the camera. A consent you collected and cannot act on in the moment is worse than one you never asked for, because it looks like permission.
One question that pays for the next programme
“How did you hear about the programme?” costs a respondent three seconds and settles an argument that otherwise runs on opinion. If 40 registrations out of 90 came from a printed notice in one neighbourhood and 6 came from a month of posting online, next season's effort writes itself.
Keep the choices to the channels you actually used this time, and rewrite them for the next programme instead of carrying an old list forward. A choice that names something you did not do collects the answers of people who were guessing, and one honest “somewhere else” is worth more than five plausible options.