Your membership, your say

“We’re always pleased to hear from our members and value the opinions they share with us. Over the past two years we’ve shaped our activities and strategies based on the responses from members in 2014. We want to encourage our members to take the time to complete this year’s survey and help us develop support for our community and profession.”

Clare Viney, Director, Membership and External Affairs at the Royal Society of Chemistry 

Member benefits and pride

We were really pleased to hear in our last survey that most of our members, 84%, are proud to be a part of the Royal Society of Chemistry. That’s one of the reasons we strive to ensure that it’s relevant to chemical scientists at all stages of their lives and careers. While that figure is encouraging, the survey showed us where there was a need for more support. We always look to reassess the benefits we provide to members and the results of our biennial member survey are a key method of informing us how we should change.

Over the past two years we have developed a mentoring scheme for our members, partnering mentors and mentees to develop relationships, supporting them in their career, as well as aspects of their personal life that they wish to discuss.

“We set up the mentoring scheme in response to feedback from members and whilst we had done a mentoring scheme in the past we felt that this was the right time to try again. The response we have had has been overwhelmingly positive and in eight months we have trained and matched 63 members as mentors or mentees with over 30 relationships currently on-going.

"The benefits of mentoring are so diverse and are mutually beneficial to both mentee and mentor almost in equal measure. We are so pleased to be able to offer this valuable service and develop further over the coming months.”

Charlotte Ashley-Roberts, Careers Specialist at the Royal Society of Chemistry

To find out more about our mentoring scheme, email one of our careers specialists.

Raising awareness

We’ve known for a while that the awareness of our benevolent fund amongst members has been low. By using the results from our last survey we were able to understand why this is and how we might go about raising awareness and highlighting its relevance to members. We were able to follow up with members who were happy to be contacted, carrying out focus groups, which helped us to further develop the service specifically to the needs of our members.

The future of the chemical sciences

From our last survey, we know our members feel it’s important that we continue to campaign for the chemical sciences and provide access to latest developments. We feel it’s important that we not only continue our work in this area but that we involve our members along the way. Earlier this year we ran a campaign to protect the science budget in real terms, providing you with pre-written letters to edit and send on to your local MP. The positive impact of this was seen in the spending review in November when Chancellor George Osborne announced the protection for the science budget in real terms (see our recent opinion piece for more on that). We’re continuing to look for new and engaging ways we can support members, involving them in campaigning for science.

Overall, we’re pleased to report that most of our members are satisfied with their membership, echoing a feeling of pride and support. However, some of you working in the Industry sector feel there is more that we could offer and are less likely to feel as supported. This is something that we’ve been aware of and have been working on over the past few years. Feeding these responses into our strategy, we have continued to increase our support for the chemical sciences industry. Professional development and recognition of chemists in industry, accelerating innovation and supporting small companies are at the top of our agenda.

The development of both our EnterprisePlus scheme and Emerging Technologies Competition focused on two of these priorities, particularly supporting smaller companies and also in driving links between academia and industry, an area which you fed back to us as being the top area where we should increase our activities.

We don’t just use the top-level feedback from the survey. We also drill down into the data to understand what specific segments or demographics of our community think or feel, particularly when we are looking at how we should develop activities.

As an example, we used the data from 2014 to understand better how our members in Ireland perceive our support, and acting on this we have since introduced more regional support staff and more targeted education support. We have also looked at the particular needs of our early career members and, following some further work on this, we launched the Early Career Network this year.

It’s really important to us that as many members as possible respond to the survey, as that really improves our understanding of the needs of different groups of members in as much detail as possible. There are many other areas in which your feedback through the membership survey has informed our plans and thinking, which is why it is so important for us to get your up-to-date thoughts in this next survey.

This year’s survey

You will receive an email invitation on or around 19 January 2016, so you can have your say on your membership. This will contain a personal link to the survey and all you need to do is click on it and answer the questions.

To ensure that the survey and all results are kept completely anonymous and comply with the Market Research Society Code of Conduct, we have partnered with an external market research agency, Research by Design.

They will be sending out the email on our behalf, so you can be sure that we can’t identify individual respondents. We need your input to help us improve your membership, your services and your benefits.

Please do let us know what you think.