Aspire - Coordinators Guide

Introduction
To maximise the value of using Aspire it is important to set up the assessment carefully. There are key aspects to consider, which are detailed on this page:

1. Introducing Aspire to your organisation
2. Choosing participants
3. Briefing participants
4. The reports
5. Guidance on registration
6. Completing the questionnaires

It is vitally important that you position Aspire appropriately in your organisation. How, when, and to whom, will you communicate:

You may feel you need professional help to work through these and other crucial contextual issues. Your Aspire Adviser could help with these.

When you have purchased Aspire, please email aspire@christiandistinctives.org to arrange contact with your Aspire Adviser and decide how you would like to use the advisers time that is allocated for you.

(a) groups of staff
Questionnaires should be completed by representatives of each group of people listed under the following five headings, or the nearest equivalent in your organisation or Church.

In addition to the people who actually complete the questionnaires, we strongly recommend that your organisation sets up a project team or steering committee to work on introducing the process, interpreting the results, and then designing and implementing your action plan for making improvements in the organisation as a result of Aspire.

The Co-ordinator:
You will need to appoint a co-ordinator for the project who will ensure the process is completed by all concerned, and that the feedback and results are interpreted effectively with follow up action if required. You have probably already been chosen for this role, if you are reading these notes!

At least one member of the leadership team:
This will be a senior leader in the organisation who is on 'the board' or 'the Senior Management Team'. In a church this may be a minister, pastor or member of the clergy. In some organisations the most appropriate person may be an actively involved trustee. In the questionnaires, we refer to this person as a "senior leader"

The Human Resources lead person:
This will be the person 'officially' responsible for HR issues or the leader who normally deals with people-related matters. For small organisations the 'leader' and HR lead may be one and the same person. We refer to this person as either the "HR Leader" (whose main role is HR) or "senior leader (with HR responsibility)". If you have an HR leader, then just use this category, as a senior leader with HR responsibility will have a lot more questions to answer!

At least one Manager:
These are team leaders or ministry leaders, who are responsible for other staff and whose role is mainly implementing or operational, rather than strategic or decision-making. If your organisation does not have any 'middle' managers, then choose people whose role involves a high level of people management. We refer to these people as "managers/team leaders"

Your Staff team:
These are the rest of your people! We have referred to them by the term "staff", but in some organisations they will include regular volunteers and other key people connected to the organisation, even if you don't view them as "staff".

Having selected your participants, put them into each of the role type categories, so they can select the appropriate questionnaire type when they register. These role types are:

(b) how to define a representative sample from each group
When choosing a representative sample from each of these categories, there are a number of other factors you should consider, in order to involve a varied cross-section of the organisation. You should choose people with a variety of:

We have included a table below of the suggested total percentage of people who should complete the assessment. This is only a guide as each organisation needs to decide on the feasibility issues involved. For the assessment to be most effective we suggest the more diverse or complex the organisation is, or the number of organisational issues that are apparent, the higher the percentage should be. If the organisation is more uniform, with strong central processes and you already gather significant internal data, then you may feel that the percentage can be lower. Note: Where the assessment mentions "people" it refers to all of the role type categories mentioned above.

We recommend that a minimum of 30 staff should complete the assessment. If your organisation is smaller than 30, then having everyone participating will give the best results.

The number of leaders and managers completing the assessment should be proportional to the organisation as a whole. The table shows, for example, that an organisation of 100 people should have 30 - 60% completing the assessment, including 30 - 60% of its leaders and managers. Only one HR lead is required whatever the size of the organisation.

It is important to understand that the validity of your results will be reduced if you involve less than the recommended minimum %, or miss out a category altogether.

Some umbrella or larger multi-site organisations may wish to analyse their results by organisation, site or geographical location. This will require the organisation to register each separately as a "small" organisation, taking account of just the people located at that site and not the whole organisation.

Wherever possible, bearing in mind the complexities of Aspire and the importance for the organisation of getting high quality data from it, you should conduct a personal briefing with participants. This could be done with groups of participants together. Some topics that this briefing could cover include:

A face to face briefing will always be preferable, but may not always be possible. If this is the case, you may want to paste the following into an email that you send to each of the participants:

Dear

As you may have heard, we are currently reviewing the way we work as an organisation and in particular looking at our Christian Distinctiveness. In order to help us do this, we are asking a number of our people to complete an on-line assessment, stating honestly how they feel we are doing as an organisation. The assessment is called "ASPIRE" and the questionnaire should not take more than 20 - 30 minutes to complete. For best results, you should find a time when you have access to a computer and can complete it in one sitting. If this is not possible, you will need to contact me to regain access to your questionnaire. You will find further guidelines when you log onto the website and you can also find out more background on ASPIRE at xxxxxxxxxx

In order to complete the assessment, you will need the following information:

Our organisation's ID: (insert ID)

Your participant's password: (insert password)

Your questionnaire Type - for registering (insert role type)

We would like you to complete the assessment as soon as possible, but certainly by (insert date)

When the report has been compiled we will be letting the whole organisation know the outcome and our plans to grow even more spiritually passionate, organisationally excellent and distinctively Christian. Thank you for your help. We appreciate your time, thoughts and honesty. If you have any questions, either concerning the assessment or our reasons for taking on this project, please do ask me.

(insert name)

(Title), ASPIRE Assessment Co-ordinator

Even if you are briefing your people, a letter like this will be needed to ensure everyone has the details they will need. Following the initial briefing, please continue to support and encourage participants as they go through the process, checking their understanding, as they play their part in helping your organisation to aspire to excellence.

Confidentiality
This is an important issue because we have sought to achieve the right balance between requesting information about respondents (to indicate that a good range of participants have been involved), and protecting individuals' anonymity. Some participants may prefer not to complete the 'job title' field, so we have indicated that it is not mandatory.

We suggest that you decide as an organisation how you wish to treat this field before you conduct your briefing of participants. The choices are, for example, to ask respondents to put in this field their location or their site or their function or their job type or, of course, their job title. If you do opt for 'job title', remember that - in small organisations in particular - participants may perceive that their anonymity may be compromised.

At a broader level, CDG's use of the data collected is totally confidential. Your organisation's contact information is held separately from the assessment data. Data will not be linked to a participant in your organisation by someone from outside. No information about individual participant's answers will ever be divulged. Nor will your organisation's results be made available to anyone outside of your organisation (apart from the Aspire Adviser whom you may chose to assist with your action plan following completion of the questionnaires.)

CDG may wish to use broad data from Aspire for research purposes, but this will always be statistical data about broad groups of organisations. It will never be possible for readers of research material based on Aspire's results to know which individual organisations particular information comes from.

Passwords and IDs
When you register, you will be given your organisation ID, a participants' password (mentioned in the email) and a co-ordinator's password. The co-ordinator's password is for you alone to use, so that you can access reports and change passwords. The participants' password is for all participants to use - including yourself, to access and answer the questionnaires. When your people register as participants, they will each be allocated a participant ID. They must make a note of their ID, in case they are unable to complete the questionnaire in one sitting or the internet connection goes down .)

Your results give you information about people's views about various aspects of your organisation. For consistency, therefore, there should not be more than two weeks between the first participant and the last completing their questionnaire. (You should regard a month as the absolute maximum.) The validity of the results will be reduced if a longer time elapses due to the changes that inevitably occur in organisations over time.

(see the ASPIRE Overview for further details)
The results report will be more open to analysis. There will be the facility to investigate the data further, interactively, further analysing areas or values, answers from different people groups, or responses to specific questions.

The report will also give you direction as to what to work on, addressing areas for development

The "registration" questions are very important to CDG as they help us overview all the responding organisations and conduct research around Aspire. The notes below help define some of these questions, but if you need to refer back you can always do so.

1) Umbrella organisation - your organisation may be connected / a member of a national or regional organisation through affiliation or membership.

2) Sectors - your organisation may not easily fall into just one category but please choose the one that you are mostly known for, or describes the majority of your work, avoiding (f) below if possible.
a) Aid/development charity - meeting physical needs or support of vulnerable people.
b) Service provider - you supply particular services or goods to a selected audience.
c) Mission - your aim is to share the Gospel message.
d) Church - you exist for Christians to be effective together in worship and outreach.
e) Christian run business - you run a commercial enterprise with a Christian ethos.
f) Other - your organisation doesn't fall into any of these categories.

3) Christian proportion - Give a realistic estimate of what proportion of your people are Christians. We have defined "Christian" elsewhere as someone who has an active, personal faith in Jesus Christ, but you may wish to adopt a definition that is more appropriate in your context.

4) Base type - The assessment can be affected by the number of locations your organisation works in. Please indicate which type of assessment is most appropriate: a) one site assessment required - where most or all your people work at one address, or you are just assessing those at one address. b) multi-site assessment required - where you are assessing the whole organisation, based in several locations.

5) HR Leader - This question determines whether you have a knowledgeable person whose main role in the organisation is Human Resources, rather than a senior leader who is also responsible for people-issues.

6) Size of organisation - your total number may include all paid staff and volunteers who are part of the organisation being assessed. You should refer to the table above for an indication of the appropriate number of participants to sample for the assessment. There is nothing to stop you assessing just one particular location or department. If this is the case, the size is only those people who are within "scope" of this assessment.

7) Organisation's Faith position - Your organisation may not easily fall into just one category, but please choose one that describes your predominant position.
a) anglo-catholic
b) charismatic
c) ecumenical
d) evangelical
e) traditional
f) other

With honesty:
For the assessment to be most effective and helpful to the organisation, we would encourage you to be as honest as possible. There is always a temptation to answer the questions in a way that reflects the way you want it to be or are working towards. Asking yourself "does this really happen?" will help you evaluate how far you have got in this on-going process.

With a spirit of understanding:
We have endeavoured to phrase questions in the light of the spectrum of organisations and churches using ASPIRE. Care needs to be taken in understanding the spirit of the question. We have phrased most questions in a way that implies a formalised process or policy, but this can apply equally to an informal approach in a smaller organisation. For instance, when we talk of policy, larger organisations may have structured and detailed policies, whereas a smaller church may just have an unwritten understanding, that has been thought-through, discussed and agreed. In particular, references to prayer can include individual and/or collective prayer that is either audible or silent.

In one go:
We strongly advise participants to complete the questionnaire in one sitting, but if this is not possible, they can re-enter where they left off, by using the link : www.christiandistinctives.org/aspire_resume.php . If an individual has to enter a second time they should do so within 24 hours.

Understanding leadership:
Questions about leaders refer to those who provide overall leadership of your organisation. (E.g. the senior leadership team.) However you may need to clarify with your people whether this includes your trustees. It is also important that people understand they are being asked to assess how they feel about the collective leadership style rather than just one individual.

Reports:
Before you look at your reports, please check the Participants' profile report. This will show whether all the people you have chosen have completed the questionnaires. If they haven't yet this will reflect in the results.

Feedback:
Please fill in your feedback form once your have completed your assessment and analysed your reports. We are keen to hear how helpful you found this process and to act on any suggestions you may have. You'll find the feedback form on the View Reports menu. �and don't forget to refer to the Glossary.