✨Dining

I'm pretty sure all of our respective communities have had Resident Satisfaction Surveys conducted by a professional survey company (like Holleran). These surveys usually have a "Dining" section seeking ratings and comments.

This inquiry here has a different twist .... the resident Dining Committee of my community, The Village at Brookwood (Burlington NC), is wondering if any of your communities ever created and conducted your own "homemade" (in other words, NOT spending any money for an outside firm) survey to learn more about resident opinions about Dining.... any or all aspects.  

If your response is yes, we'd like to back channel you to learn more details.

Thanks.

Jennifer Young

The Village at Brookwood

Dear Jennifer,

My name is Barb Peabody. I am the current dining chair at Monroe Village. My husband, Ken, is a member of NaCCRA. I created and administered an informal survey on vegetable and starch preferences in 2023. I would be interested in communicating with you.

no resident initiated dining survey here, but dining services have always had comment cards available. years ago they used to be slips of paper available on tables in the dining room. later there was an online way to submit. then only paper available at the host stand. they have just gone back to a new online system.

in my opinion, checking off great, good, so-so, terrible or some such wording is meaningless. Even sillier is publishing with glee that 79% of respondents are very happy or any other such statistic. What is meaningful is the opportunity to give specific comments about specific dishes, e.g., thickening soups with corn starch is terrible, loved the chicken florentine, pasta dish on Wedneday was too salty, could we have baked beans more often, etc. Theoretically, our dining services take such comments seriously.

Lorrie Rogers

Collington

Sharon here from The Neighborhood in Rio Rancho NM. It is not hard to do simple surveys if you can find a willing resident who has done that type of work in the past. We've done several on several topics. The dining survey we did was a one-pager, but we got a lot of good data from it and it was helpful in making our case to management. If you want to go the electronic direction, check out Survey Monkey, a free online program that helps you create a survey and then (magic!) analyzes it all for you, including open ended questions.