Observations from the member survey: services divide our members

During the spring, we have collected feedback from HYY’s members with our member survey, at events and in meetings, for instance. In this blog series, HYY’s Chief Financial and Service Officer Anna Laurila reviews the feedback we received.

HYY’s member survey was open throughout February, and we received around 300 responses to it. We also got another 140 written responses in our feedback box at HYY’s pop-up events on campuses. Thank you to everyone who has given us feedback on HYY’s activities!

The feedback on HYY’s services is more divided than feedback on advocacy work. On the one hand, some people want HYY to organise more events, be more visible in everyday life on campuses and diversify its services. On the other hand, however, others want HYY to organise fewer events and, to a large extent, cut back on its services. Criticism on services is linked to the respondents feeling that the membership fee is high and should be reduced through cuts to services, for instance.

We recognise that people want HYY to provide more diverse services and more opportunities to meet students from different disciplines. People want HYY to serve as the glue that keeps our community together. Of course, the invaluable work organisations do for communality should not be forgotten here. However, we do not have the personnel or financial resources to produce new mass events unless we give up something else.

We are now answering your wishes through service design for our current events. We will do something new – but with the same or smaller budget than before. This year’s Flora’s Day festivities, for instance, were realised in an entirely new way compared to the past decade. We have also set up an event calendar on HYY’s website, allowing organisations operating under HYY to submit their events to it. We hope that this will make it easier for our members to find events within our community, allowing them to meet other students over disciplinary boundaries.

Our members have different views on other services too. Ylioppilaslehti received both praise and criticism. We have set up a working group to assess the magazine’s future in the spring. Our aim is to reach some kind of a consensus on developing the magazine.

Our childcare service Little HYY is considered unnecessary – except when we ask students with children. Their responses emphasised the need for the service and also included wishes for expanding it onto other campuses or towards the direction of a family club. Expanding Little HYY onto other campuses is not possible within our financial framework, but we are currently cooperating with the University of Helsinki to support students with children. Family club activities have also crossed our mind, but more information on this will be provided later after we have sorted out our plans!

What action has HYY taken based on the feedback we have received?

1. We are reforming our event concepts. Flora’s Day and HYY’s May Day, for instance, were brought closer to students in the spring. We are also investing in marketing the event calendar to organisations to make the diverse event selection of our own community easier to find.
2. We are developing services provided by HYY in a cost-efficient manner. For instance, we are charting various discounts and offers on services our members consider important. Our aim is to increase the added value students get from being our member one step at a time. We are reforming HYY’s guidance services related to the themes of equality, legal protection and harassment to allow members who encounter a problem situation related to student life to use a single service point.

These are obviously not the only things we are working on, but we are committed to developing our operations towards the direction our members want us to, both now and in the future.

And just to be clear: you have not missed the only moment when members can submit feedback to HYY. You can send feedback to HYY’s Board and personnel directly throughout the year. You can also submit feedback using the feedback form on HYY’s website. We will also conduct member surveys in the future. Finally, you can influence HYY’s operation by running as a candidate in the Representative Council elections – or at least by voting in them.

We still have some way to go to reach our target level on meaningful membership and satisfaction with the membership fee. However, your feedback helps us assess whether we are on the right path.

Anna Laurila
Chief financial and service officer