tory paez

Background:  The Asociación de Desarrollo Integral (ADI) is the local community development organization in Isla de Chira. Nearly all Costa Rican communities have an ADI that focuses on large-scale community initiatives. Our ADI received a computer donation several years ago with the help of a previous Peace Corps volunteer; however, once the computers were donated and the volunteer completed a few trainings, the computer primarily remained idle. We worked with the ADI to create and execute a community-wide survey, so we could accomplish our three primary goals (outlined below). We travelled to the six major communities to administer the surveys one-on-one to community members. We had both paper surveys, as well as the Survey Monkey app to complete the survey on our phones.  

 

Purpose: There were three primary goals of this community survey:

1. To understand the actual use of the computer lab today 

2. To measure the interest of the community for use in the future

3. To create a schedule for "open lab" for communities members 

 

Audience: Isla de Chira community members (50 total)

 

Materials:

• Survey (Survey Monkey link / document )

• Results summary (link)

• Recommendations document (link)

 

Lesson Learned: The Survey Monkey app was extremely helpful! For those comfortable with the technology, it was a fun way to engage them and much easier from an administrative perspective when logging results. This exercise also highlighted some very important key trends. For example, the majority of community members who wanted to access the computer labs wanted to do on Saturdays and Sundays between 3:00 and 6:00 pm. Without this survey, we could have missed this opportunity of focused open lab time.