Listening
Run by members for members
Our Board, Committees and Council are made up of owners/staff at member garden retailer, grower or manufacturer businesses; and they meet regularly throughout the year to direct HTA activities. We also get regular feedback and input from members to guide what we do, read below to find out more...
Surveys - we use member input to evidence and influence
We know sometimes you may feel you receive too many surveys from HTA or it may feel difficult to spare the time to complete them - we truly do appreciate the busy day-to-day for our members. But without your participation, we simply wouldn't be able to evidence and effectively lobby government for change on the issues affecting our industry. We also use surveys to gauge how satisfied our members are and to guide what we should be focusing our activities on.
Find out more about what we've been able to do as a result of members input to our surveys, below.
You said, we did! What have we done as a result?
- Without members input via our survey, we wouldn’t have been able to evidence the potentially devastating impact delaying the reopening of garden centres could have on our industry during the first COVID lockdown
- We continue to lobby government to ease the trading burdens for our industry importing/exporting post- EU Exit, having successfully lobbied for a delay to inspection fees and a flat fee rate thanks to members input on volumes/value of imports
- We've been able to understand where members are currently with their sustainability efforts and tailor our new Sustainability Roadmap, resources and workshops as a result
- We updated the NGGV gift card designs using the images that members select as the winners of the annual consumer NGGV Photography Competition and the wallets are now a more traditional greetings card style shape to fit both gift cards and paper vouchers
The surveys we run are...
We ask 1/10th of contacts for members each week how satisfied they are with the HTA using a score out of ten and a short comment. This can be a window of communiacation for you to let us know what you're happy with or what more we could be doing.
How's this survey used?
The feedback is circulated to all HTA Staff every week and the relevant person will always respond to you when necessary. We also monitor the average scores over time and Management and Board meetings use the scores/feedback to drive positive change.
We call these our 'Member Voice' surveys and they go to the main contact at half of our member businesses each time, so every business should get two of these surveys a year. They cover the state of trade and often bigger business decisions we'd like members views on. This often involves formulating our stance to Government on key issues.
We run several surveys each year regarding our key services and events. These include the Gifting Consultation survey to gauge satisfaction with the NGGV scheme and what we could implement to improve it; as well as the National Plant show Visitor and Exhibitor surveys to help us improve the show year on year.
Some of our surveys are designed as a benchmarking exercise for your business. In the past we've run wages & labour benchmarking, helping members to set competitive salaries and rewards packages for staff; and 2022 will see the first financial benchmarking study, helping businesses to assess their profitability and/or financial risk.
Take a look here