by Author anita holford

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Your views on the future of the Musical Inclusion networks: survey results

We wrote: “We're in the final months of our Musical Inclusion Evaluation and Networking work and so we wanted to get some feedback from you about what you’ve found most valuable, and the future of the Musical Inclusion social networks. The natural next step is for you as an online community to take more control so we’re also keen to explore how we can help you to do this between now and the Spring” and provided a link to an online survey.

A massive thank you to all those who took part. Below is a summary of your response, and some actions for us as a team. You can also download the full results too.

Summary
  • 15 people responded, mainly project leads. 
  • They found the Youth Music Network most useful, followed very closely by the Musical Inclusion enews – people need prompts like the Musical Inclusion Group notifications and the enews to remind them to read/visit the information.
  • In terms of most useful content, there was no strong preference. Practical resources were mentioned by four people (practical resources, case studies/best practice/seeing work, checklists, 20 questions, accounts of projects and approaches taken), and there were a range of other responses). But other people mentioned issues/debates, strategy, and ‘all’.
  • When asked to specify the most useful blog/discussion/post, just under half specified practical-type resources - Readipop's urban orchestra piece, Musinc’s Make it Work videos reflecting on work and practices, rural isolation blogs, music leaders’ personal blogs, Paul Weston’s blogs. One mentioned ‘issues in depth’ (we need to bear in mind that we haven’t explored issues in depth until now, so people have no reference point.)
  • In terms of what we should be focusing on in the final months, three comments related to being able to find the content that’s already there – indexing, signposting, web improvements; one mentioned practical resources; one mentioned issues/in depth; and the other 8 comments were various.
  • Nikkie-Kate Heyes, Philip Flood, Pete Moser and Mark Bick said they’d be interested in being actively involved in developing the legacy of the Musical Inclusion online networks.
Our next steps

1.    Anita Holford(Social Media Editor, Musical Inclusion Evaluation and Networking Team) to continue to work with Sophie Scott (Youth Music Communicaitons) on improving the indexing/signposting, and editing the documentation and sharing so far into a suite of documents.

2.    Musical Inclusion Evaluation and Networking team to continue as planned with the two issue based topics / readers for the Gathering and Expo and exploring Google Chats.

3.    Anita to continue to encourage projects to document and share practical blogs, resources etc – including for final Gathering in similar way to last time, asking for pre-prepared handouts. Offer editing support to develop into checklists/top tips etc only if time allows.

4.    Prompts to read content are essential – the YMN enews has replaced the Musical Inclusion enews, but now people are posting on the Musical Inclusion group straight from their blogs, this means that members don’t get notifications of the content (Anita manually notifies them). Explore if Sophie Scott can continue this after end of programme, or could someone in the community be approached to do this.

5.    Arrange to meet, at the Gathering and/or on Google Chat, the group who’ve offered to be involved in legacy.