Youth Music Feedback Survey 2023: Summary of findings

The Youth Music Feedback Survey is an annual survey we undertake with our funded partners, as well as with those who applied for a Youth Music grant. We conduct the survey to evaluate our performance as a funder and determine areas we can improve our performance. We also use it to gather insights about the grassroots organisations and young people we work with. This year’s survey collected data on three topics: the cost-of-living crisis, environmental sustainability, and youth voice.

The survey findings are analysed by Youth Music’s Insights team and a set of recommendations are produced. These can be found at the end of this blog.

 

Key Findings

The survey received 119 responses, with the majority (79%) coming from current and previous funded partners. The remaining responses came from unsuccessful applicants (19%) and those who have never applied (2%). 

A comprehensive survey summary, which includes more detail on respondent information, can be found at the end of this blog.

Here are some of the key findings from this year’s survey.

Youth Music's Impact

• 90% rated Youth Music as an above average/excellent funder
• 80% said Youth Music has an above average/significant impact on their organisation
• 71% said Youth Music has an above average/significant impact on their wider field of work

Relationship with Youth Music

• 95% agreed/strongly agreed that they felt comfortable approaching Youth Music staff with a problem
• 95% agreed/strongly agreed that Youth Music are flexible with the requirement of their grant

 

Flexible Funding Principles

We have committed to being a Flexible Funder. We asked respondents to rate us against 10 funding principles that guide our funding practice; we were rated using a scale ranging from ‘Very poor’ to ‘Excellent’.

We were rated highly across all ten of our funding principles, ranging from 76% to 91% rating us as above average/excellent.

 

Recommendations and how we’ve responded

We’re really pleased to see the positive response for the work we do! However, we acknowledge that there were still some areas highlighted in the survey that we could look to improve.

Led by these insights, we are taking the following steps:

Recommendation One: Combine the Youth Music website and Youth Music Network website.

Consistent with previous years, respondents shared that they had issues navigating and using our websites. Last year, we said that we planned to re-launch the Youth Music website, combining both the Youth Music and Youth Music Network website. We can confirm that the process to re-launch the Youth Music website is now underway.

Recommendation Two: Youth Music staff to continue to make project visits.

In the last financial year, we were able to conduct project visits in every region we operate in across the UK. We’ll continue to conduct regular projects visits, allowing us to see the great work our funded partners do.

Recommendation Three: Provide further safeguarding and diversity support.

We have continued to develop our Safeguarding Hub, which includes resources to support your safeguarding practices. We host regular safeguarding training with our safeguarding associate through Exchanging Notes.

We continued to build the IDEA Hub to provide support on improving inclusion, diversity, equity and access practices.

Recommendation Four: Support with networking opportunities.

We regularly update our project map on the Youth Music Network website. This map shows all the active Youth Music funded projects in England. The map also includes the project focus, so you can also find organisations working in the same area as you.

We provide opportunities for networking through our Facebook Group, Exchanging Notes learning programmes and funded partner induction sessions.