Dear Makers,
What you are doing is important. A lot of spaces are hanging by a thread through this pandemic. You’re likely exhausted, wondering when things will get back to normal, and you’ve found ways to adapt to a situation that a year ago none of us could have imagined. We know that any insights you can get that can you help to make good decisions about programming, spending, or operations is incredibly valuable. Especially now.
Here is the complete 2019 Survey of Makerspaces Annual Report. The Survey of Makerspaces is no small survey to take, and it’s no small feat to have gone through ALL of your data points. We’ve taken care to remove duplicate responses, tidy and categorize a LOT of open-ended responses and put this together in a format that is easily readable and useable by you.
Please use these graphics. Credit Nation of Makers Annual Survey of Makerspaces when you do.
For the 2020 survey – well, everything’s off the rails this year. The survey will launch December 1, and we’ll still give 3 months to get it completed. One thing we’re doing different this year is launching a dashboarding initiative. This means that instead of a PDF report, we’ll have live charts and graphs and other graphics that will get updated as we get survey results in.
If you have a thing for data science – if this is your job, your hobby, or if you’re a student, please reach out to Jennifer (ittybittyartist@gmail) and help us build dashboards. If you know of undergrad or graduate graphic design, business administration, or data science students looking for a good (albeit unpaid at the moment) internship, please do send them our way.
Here are your survey results. Please remember that dozens of people have entirely voluntarily poured hundreds of hours of love, commitment, frustration, tears, and probably even a few swear words into this document. We hope you will continue to support this project by filling out the 2020 survey when it’s open. (And yes, we’re still going to be sending out Challenge coins.)
Love and box plots,
The Nation of Makers Metric of Impact Working Group