Samaritan Podcast: The National Benchmark Survey
Keith Leonard: Hi, welcome everyone to… Samaritan’s podcast regarding the National Benchmark Survey. We wanted to get together with the partners we worked with to tell the story about how the survey came into existence and allow each of us to kind of tell our part, up until the involvement with the Beryl Institute. So today, we have with us Maryellen Brady from Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, Stanford. Sara Flores and Barbara Ruff… Barbara Ruffer Thurford…Rutherford. There’s our first mix-up today. Can’t say your name, apparently, Barbara. From Kaiser Permanente. And myself, Keith Leonard, and Bryce Robinson from Samaritan Software. So thank you everyone for joining. Welcome to the first time we’ve recorded this together. I hope you’re all doing well today.
Maryellen Brady: Thank you.
Sara Flores: Happy to be here.
Barbara Rutherford: A pleasure.
The Origin Story
Keith Leonard: Alright, so this all began years and years ago for us here at Samaritan. As a software company, working in healthcare specifically, we are constantly asked what others are doing—what each of our clients have done. As we have conversations with potential clients, we’re constantly asked, “well, how do others do it?” And that conversation was useful, except for Samaritan only represents a percentage of the actual market space. So, only… we, you know, we talk to… we’d love to talk to everyone, but frankly, we only talk to a certain number. And, we only have so much, and I really wanted something and some way to know and help the industry with comparing one organization to another.
And it kind of dawned on me years ago that a benchmark would do that, right? An actually established standard. And when we first started working and looking at this—and this is probably about a decade ago, maybe even more, probably actually 15 years ago—we came up with the fact that there was no benchmark survey for volunteerism. And specifically, as well, for healthcare volunteerism. And so, there are numbers, right? So, you know, Independent Sector for years has been producing the volunteer value, a dollar of a volunteer value, and there are other kind of studies and groups that have done pieces of the puzzle, but no one had actually produced a benchmark survey.
And I think the first time I started talking to others outside of Samaritan about this was actually Maryellen Brady. We started talking about it years ago because as we went through an implementation with her, she asked the same questions that others had about, you know, what are others doing, and, you know, what could we do to improve our process, and I’m interested. And so, we talked about it through our implementation. And then, however, years later, internally in Samaritan, the marketing group here was thinking about projects that we could work on, and the benchmark survey came up again. And I, as part of that group, said this has been something I’ve cared about for years that we haven’t really, you know, done. I would love to actually kind of lead that, and I know exactly who I want to talk to. And so, I actually reached out to Maryellen. Maryellen, do you remember—I don’t know if you remember that conversation—you know, and what happened afterwards, but would you like to tell us a little bit of your story?
Maryellen Brady: So, we had a lot of conversations, Keith, about this, and some of them were talking about how can we get the word out about, you know, what we do in volunteer services, volunteer professionals. You know, how can we get leadership to recognize us and the work that we do? And, just have been doing stuff on my own for many years. I am doing… gathering my own information and working with my colleagues to just try to move the profession forward and maybe make things not so fluff anymore in the world of volunteer services. And then at that time, my lovely colleague, Sara, had contacted me, because she was working on a very similar issue. And I think, Sara, that’s where your fun story picks up. So, Sara, take it away.
Sara Flores: Yeah, Maryellen, it was, you know… being in volunteer services, you’re searching for “what size should our programs be?” “What should it look like at a medical center?” I had leadership in Southern California, Kaiser Permanente, asking me, like, “well, what are other organizations doing?” “How should our programs be made in volunteer services?” And there just wasn’t really anything. And then that’s when Maryellen and I connected. I was like, “have you done anything like this? Have you asked people? If I surveyed you, Maryellen, would you take my little survey?” And I think I started with interviews of, like, seven different organizations was my start of, like, “I just need to know other organizations in California, what are they doing in volunteer services?” And that’s when Maryellen’s like, we need to connect with Keith, because he’s passionate about this too, and maybe we, you know, can get some movement going on this, because, you know, every organization out of those other seven that I talked to, they all wanted the same thing. So there was the desire, right, and the appetite for some type of survey, some type of knowledge, and some type of way to elevate the profession of volunteer services.
Timeline and Research
Keith Leonard: Now, I can’t remember… how long ago was this? Do we… was this two years ago? Three years ago? This is… At this point, are we talking about…
Maryellen Brady: Sara reached out to me in… I think it was November 2023. And, we… it might have even been September… I don’t know, something around there. And then… we had a lot of conversation about how, you know, we are always getting contacted—not just us, but, like, each other—we’re all contacting each other, and moving each other forward, and going, “oh, I have this many FTE, and I do this, and I do that,” but there was no one centralized place for all of us to look to, or look for, you know, this information, and it’s… you know, still happening today. It’s not going to be happening too much longer, but it’s still happening today. You know, we have some great data now. So, but, yeah, it’s been… it’s been… it’s been a long time.
Keith Leonard: I remember we all met, the three of us, and, you know, kind of saying… and I think there were a lot of these questions about “what would this look like?”, and I think the answer was, “we don’t know,” right? You know, we know, we want to ask some questions. I think we arrived at the idea that, well, before we go off and do something… We know, because I think, if I remember right, Maryellen, I think you brought up, or maybe it was you, Sara, that you said, “hey, you know, CAWS, the local organization in California, has kind of asked questions before,” and so we said, “well, we think that the first step is for us to go and review these other surveys and see if they would represent what could be a benchmark… a national benchmark survey,” right? Because the CAWS one was more California-specific, and so I think we all decided that let’s do research.
And so, I don’t remember… I know Samaritan, we went off and did some research, because I do, you know, and we came across, ultimately, we didn’t find any national survey in the U.S. that we thought was comprehensive enough. It was either localized, but it wasn’t… it was also, like, maybe a few questions. I do recall that one of you mentioned that, I think it was Sara said, there is an organization that benchmark—you know, when they went… and it was another company, and they kind of benchmarked, but they were more interested in, like, the overall picture of the hospital itself, and weren’t focused only on volunteerism. I think, if I remember right, I think also we learned that from one of the other Stanford, I think the Stanford medicine side, that they said, “yeah, this survey we fill out, I think there were three questions on volunteerism,” and we said, “no, no, that’s not enough.” Does that all sound familiar before we actually kind of found the international survey?
Maryellen Brady: Yeah, I also think we were trying to, before we even began, to figure out—because we all agreed that everyone has survey burnout—like, if we were going to move this forward, what was going to be the easiest way? And we did a lot of research on, you know, how many hospitals were there, what kind of data is out there, not just survey data, but hospital data, and how easy is that to find and see if maybe that could be feeding through a survey to make life easier for people, so that they weren’t spending so much time on simple things so we could really get to what we wanted to talk about. So I think it wasn’t just… there was just a lot of prep, it wasn’t just, you know, making… creating these questions, this research, and finding out what else is going on, but also, like, “if we’re going to do this, let’s be smart about it so that people don’t have survey burnout, and we do get the numbers we needed.” So I think that was another thing as well, so…
Sara Flores: Yeah, and I think we looked at HCAHPS, right? Didn’t we use that as, like, one of the guiding points? So it’s like, okay, here we have HCAHPS surveys, right, that all hospital, you know, every member… every patient that gets discharged from a hospital, it’s regulated, they have to get an HCAHPS survey that’s going to ask them about their experience, and we said, “okay, this is, you know, you can go onto a website, you can look at scores from these surveys,” and that was kind of our end game, right? We’re like, “okay, that’s where we want to get to one day,” right? Was, like, this survey being so robust that you can go up and go on a website, alright, and start looking at hospitals and looking at their volunteer programs, right? And things along those lines. So I think, like, we had a really great, like, North Star of, like, where we want to go, and, you know, it was just incredible to find people that also had such passion, because it took so many years and hours to get to where we’re at today.
Maryellen Brady: We were dreaming pretty big, though, Sara.
Sara Flores: We weren’t… we always love to dream big, guys.
Maryellen Brady: Yes, yes.
International Expansion and Hospice Inclusion
Keith Leonard: Right, we looked at the fact… I think that’s where we started looking at hospitals, right? And we said, look, there’s, you know, the numbers kind of vary a little bit, but there’s about 4,000… there’s surveys that go anywhere between 4,000 and 6,000 hospitals, and we said, “well, how many do we want?” And I think our first answer was, “we want them all.” We want all, you know, all 4,000 to 6,000 responding. And we… and then, you know, because we had those big, big ideas. Because I… I remember at some point as well, around that same time, two things happened. We discovered an international survey… a survey in Australia. That actually would cover, kind of, from what we thought when we were first looking at it, it seemed to cover Australia. And then New Zealand—we actually found it had been running for a handful of years, I think even more than 10, actually, and it had covered… seemed like it had first started in Australia, then New Zealand, then Canada, and it also had some other, some U.S. hospitals. And it was… it was pretty big, and I think it was something like… was it… like, it had been small and then grown over time.
Before that—excuse me, I forgot a step—we’d started putting questions down, right? “What questions would you want?” And realized how many questions there could be, realized we should look for other surveys. Found this survey—was it the Love Network? Did I get that right?
Maryellen Brady: Yeah.
Keith Leonard: That’s it. And the contact was… has a great name, Shaz, right? That’s her nickname, but she goes by Shaz. And so we said, “we should reach out, because honestly, the survey is everything we are dreaming of.” And I think, Maryellen, or Sara, one of the two of you, we said we should have you reach out. They don’t know who we are at Samaritan, but you’re in the industry, so I think, Maryellen, you reached out to Shaz and said, “hey, would you be willing to talk to us?”
Maryellen Brady: I did. I found her, I think, on LinkedIn, and, she was so gracious to meet with us. We had a nice long… we were on the phone with… or the call with her for quite some time, and she really talked to us about her process, and the pros and cons, and some of her challenges, and, you know, and was really excited for us, and gave us some great feedback about how to move forward and what to avoid. And then was hoping that, you know, she would also see the results of this survey at one point. So, I know even later on, we reached out to her, which we’ll get to later on, but, you know, and she gave us additional feedback, but she was really knowledgeable about how to get this done. And I thought… I kept thinking, “how is this so hard? Like, how could this be so hard? We just have a couple questions,” and now I know. Now I know, and I have even more respect for Shaz for her doing this for so many years, so…
Keith Leonard: I remember her saying, “feel free to use the survey,” right? She’s like, “oh yeah, you know, if you want to copy them,” then she agreed. She said, “you may have questions that don’t make… that don’t correlate from, you know, Australia to the United States. You might have different questions.” She also said, I think if I remember right, she’s like, “I’m not sure that we’re gonna keep running it.” So then we started getting these aspirations of international, and we’re like, “yeah,” you know, we hadn’t been thinking that, so it got even bigger. And I think it’s about that time, too, that we were like, “well, we’re only talking to hospitals, what about the hospice world?” I think that was all, like, on top of each other, right? We were… I mean, at this point, we had decided to meet, we were meeting, were we meeting, like, every couple weeks, I think. And we would kind of take… talk about how this would formulate. We were like, “we’re gonna need partners, how do we make this have credibility across all the market space?” And so we all were, you know, we started reaching out to other people, other hospitals. Right? And I think that’s where Barbara comes into the conversation, right?
Sara Flores: Yes, yes, you’re right. Well, and we were just like, there is… I think we are talking about… we came up with conferences, and that there’s this whole community of volunteer professionals in the hospice space, and, you know, Maryellen and I are not professionals in that space, right? And so that’s when I, you know, I knew Barbara from working with her at Kaiser, and I was like, “Barbara R., do you have interest in this?” Just from the interactions we had, I had already, you know, known that she would have had a passion for it, right? And that she would have saw the value in it. And then that’s when we brought her into the team. And yeah, and you say, like, we’d meet once every few weeks—it was, like, twice a week, Keith.
Keith Leonard: Multiple hours. I remember that, I thought that came later. Was it already that early on?
Sara Flores: That was a lot.
Maryellen Brady: It was pretty deep from the get-go. Yeah.
Barbara Rutherford: Yeah, I feel like that by the time that Sara reached out to me and I joined, you guys were already doing the double Dutch with, like, multiple things happening at the same time, and I had to kind of jump in and find the flow with it. But… you know, it’s really interesting to actually hear you talk about even, you know, a decade ago, or just really the thoughts leading up to it, because I have been having these same conversations over the last 13 years of working in this space with my professional peers at other hospices in Southern California and within San Diego, and the same questions that you all talked about. We were really trying to find information from each other and help to support each other, and we knew that you know, more information, more data, more connection was really going to help elevate our programs, which is essentially what we’re talking about—you know, really examining what efforts, what resources, what organizational structures really create ideal volunteer programming, for both hospital and hospice, just really in the healthcare space.
So, when, I think, actually, Keith, I spoke with you maybe the first time—I want to say it was 2019 or 2020, because we were looking at a lot of different volunteer management systems for Southern California Hospice, specifically for Kaiser, and our conversations really kind of started then and then developed. But within, I think, maybe 2 years of that, Sara and I were working on task force to help build what we have now, which is a Samaritan system, not just for hospital, not just for hospice, but for all of Kaiser Permanente’s volunteer programs, really kind of putting them under one roof, which was a Herculean task, you know, just on its own. It took a very long time to do that.
But when she asked me if I would be interested, of course, I’m like, “of course I’m interested!” I’m just waiting for someone to kind of ask these questions, and, you know, I really give a lot of kudos to all of you, because hospice is so underrepresented, really, and across the spectrum. And a lot of that, I think, has to do with a natural bias of people really shying from the subject and not being sure of how to approach it. And so to be asked to participate and to be a really integrated member of it was… was a dream come true, I guess you could say. You know, I really… I think I said that to you, Sara, at some point of, “yeah, you asked me to be a part of this, so I’m in it, 100%.” I really want to see what we can come up with, and it was a lot of hours, and I came in… it’s been almost 2 years. There’ll be 2 years, actually, next month, so in a couple weeks. But we did dedicate a lot of time, a lot of hours, and very careful consideration to every component of what we’re doing to make sure that it was meaningful and inclusive and representative of what’s out there.
Technical Process and Transition to Beryl Institute
Keith Leonard: Yeah, I think you represent what I saw. I remember, actually, I was at a keynote at a conference, and they mentioned that, you shouldn’t think of it as… healthcare, not as hospital and hospice, but healthcare systems. And that was the moment where I kind of started realizing, you know, because we have been at Samaritan primarily hospital-based… and then as hospices were starting to get integrated into these healthcare systems, I really saw, like, the future of healthcare and healthcare volunteerism is this unified group. Certainly Kaiser has that approach. Everyone’s on a different capacity maturity model, everyone’s in different journeys, but that certainly is part of what’s been happening. I even wonder now, looking at the survey, will it change in that regard as well? Because you’ve got other groups like the PFCCs, student groups… even auxiliaries now. This is never done, unfortunately.
We wanted to talk a couple minutes about just the process—so kind of the weeds for those kind of people who like to geek out and be like, “what did you guys do?” So we were meeting two days a week. We had a very strong deadline. I know we at Samaritan had looked at, like, Google Forms and Google Surveys. And we were most familiar with those, so we just started building it into a Google survey to see what it would look like. We kind of decided that may not be the long-term way. But we were really hyper-focused at that time into the questions. What were the right questions? As we brought Barbara in, saying, “okay Barbara, does this question make sense for hospital and hospice, or no? Should we change it?” So that led to technical questions of, can we show one question versus the other, and so forth. What do you all remember as some of the parts that kind of stand out to you about being in the weeds?
Sara Flores: Laboring. We were so… we wanted to make sure we asked the questions the right way. So we got in the… like, we would labor over one question sometimes, and how that question was worded.
Maryellen Brady: Definition of a volunteer.
Sara Flores: Yeah! It was, like, laboring over the littlest thing, because we knew, one, our audience doesn’t have a huge attention span, right? We know our managers are so busy. So if we don’t really put in the time up front and labor over word usage, we’re gonna lose that one opportunity to capture them. Maryellen hit it on the head—we labor over what is the definition of a volunteer. We would reword it, and word it again, and then meet two days later and go, “oh my gosh, I have a better way of wording that.” We really put in the time up front to be thoughtful and methodical… reading a question and going, “well, how would that make me feel if I answered it? Would I want to answer that question?”
Keith Leonard: Order, too, right? That’s where I think we started seeing some big changes from Shaz’s survey. Because we’re like, we really should move this to a different section, or create a whole new section.
Maryellen Brady: Yeah. I also think that was the time where Barbara jumped in with that double Dutch, like nobody’s business, nice and smooth, and I started learning a lot more about hospice. I started thinking more thoughtfully about how the questions were going to be posed so that it was encompassing all of us, not just my little world of pediatrics. I think having that perspective—all three of us in different roles and different types of hospitals—that also was eye-opening. I think we joked all the time about, forget survey burnout, we have, like, “question survey burnout” just from trying to get this one word right. And I think what moved us forward, Keith, was you and Bryce really starting talking about putting things into categories, which really helped us organize our thoughts as well.
Barbara Rutherford: Yeah, your organization and keeping us to task was critical. It was pivotal, really. But without a national benchmark survey, we didn’t really have a common language. We were creating it together… making sure that we examined every portion of what a definition could be so that we didn’t throw off a respondent. Some of that was clear in terms of how hospital volunteers are managed, but was opposed to the language of how hospice volunteers really look. Each segment of volunteering—teen, etc.—has their own language. Combining all of that together… it really required a lot of attention and a lot of thought and care.
Maryellen Brady: I just wanted to add that we didn’t plan that all three of us are from California, that just happened. And so we had a very California perspective. I do think that Samaritan helped us with that, because you have partners across the country, so you were able to bring some of that in before we started talking to focus groups.
Keith Leonard: That’s actually similar to what I was going to say. You’d say, “well, I know how we do it at our organizations, but Samaritan, what have you seen with others?” I consulted internally, but we’d say, “okay, we’re talking about the weeds of activity status, and what values…” I remember Sara, at one point, I was like, “I want to ask all the questions, and I want to know all the implementation steps,” and Sara’s like, “Keith, I have so many questions, like… you gotta back off. You’ve got too much energy right now for that.” Bryce, I can’t remember how many times you rebuilt that survey, but you probably built it, like, at least 3 to 5 times.
Barbara Rutherford: Bless Bryce.
Maryellen Brady: Another thing—even though it was only 2 years ago—we very rarely used any sort of AI. I think that’s changed so much in just 2 years. Now we’re like, “let’s just put this in and see what ChatGPT says.”
Keith Leonard: Isn’t that crazy? We must be connected in our minds. We didn’t use AI. If we did this again, we would probably feed version after version to AI. I do remember, to your point, we had the question about, “should we bring more people in?” Samaritan clients versus non-Samaritan clients? In the end, we decided… like, there’s a reason why the military puts groups into small units, right? A small unit can get a lot done. We came to a conclusion that perhaps we should have a first draft, and then go out and ask them for opinions. We did a draft, and then we went out and did a focus group, right?
Sara Flores: Yeah, we sent out a draft version to a focus group to take and give us edits to. They’d come back with questions and comments. Keith, thanks to Samaritan, a lot of connections were made with individuals that we didn’t know. Then we host a focus group talk about each question and their feedback. Keeping it small allowed us to be agile. We really brought in the voice of the customer. We’d hear their groans about the length and go, “okay, what questions are we gonna cut out?”
Keith Leonard: Absolutely. And that’s the time, too, we started saying, “alright, how does this look coming from Samaritan versus should it come from another party?” We started bringing up the concept… hitting the fact that perhaps this shouldn’t come from Samaritan, it should come from other groups. We looked at other partners, conferences… hospice conferences… hospital groups. Ultimately, Samaritan had a relationship—Stanford and Kaiser have relationships—with the Beryl Institute. We knew that they had done their patient experience survey and thought, “they’re doing this in patient experience.” After HVRP disappeared, the Beryl Institute got involved with healthcare volunteerism, so there was a presence already. Maybe the Beryl Institute would be one of those potential partners.
Launch and Final Reflections
Sara Flores: Yeah, and I think the Beryl Institute was… is an international organization, too, and that was big for us, right? Tying it back to the times of Shaz and talking to her. You know, we… we wanted… our big future plans at the beginning, right, was this to be a big survey, international survey? How are other countries, you know, doing this? So I think that was one of the big draws to the Beryl Institute, right? And then also how they conduct their other surveys and their research, and the community they have built for their organization.
Keith Leonard: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so I think, if I remember right, so we have, you know, Samaritan reached out to the Beryl Institute, they were interested. We started having conversations about how and what that would look like, which eventually actually led to the Beryl Institute taking over, kind of like the operational part that Samaritan had been doing. Still working with you all, and having, you know, the three of you carry this to completion. Which I… we don’t know at Samaritan as much about, but, you know, that’s kind of how that worked out, and how the Beryl came in, and ultimately carried this to the finish line, running the survey, and ultimately producing it. And then Samaritan kind of moving to a role of more just kind of being the sponsor.
It was kind of a happy, sad moment, you know, we were glad to have another partner come in. But, you know, I remember, you know, just talking about some of the joys, like… this project was a lot. But I… at no point did I ever… like, these calls were just fun. And working with you all, I can’t… we laugh so much. It’s just the joy of my career to work with smart and people who have the same hope, have the same dedication, because it gives you energy. We had… this wasn’t easy, right? But I just remember, like, it was a joy… like, Bryce and I, we’d be like, “okay, when do we get to meet with them again,” right? Sometimes, you know, we’d spend and just kind of talk shop before we’d get into the survey, but those are some of the things I remember enjoying. What memories do you guys have of all those working sessions?
Barbara Rutherford: You know, it’s, I love what you said about it, and it’s interesting, because I know all of us participated in those calls, whether we were on vacation or we were, you know, wherever we were at, we wanted to be a part of it. It’s one of the best volunteer projects that I’ve worked on, you know, in my life. It was the common goal of knowing that this information is so incredibly important, and that we really were going to do everything that we were in control of to be able to see it come to fruition, and to have it happen. Because if it wasn’t going to be us, if we allowed it to be buried, or we didn’t work on it, then we’re going to be having the same conversation of what’s going on out in our field, you know, in 5 or 10 years.
There was a lot of motivation, and I certainly appreciated… our group has kind of a servant leadership attitude about it. Yes, these things can get sticky, and we did turn over maybe the same question, you know, multiple times and spend a lot of time on it. But it really speaks to the care and the importance that I think we all embraced about this work. And I think it’s a happy bonus that we all actually really like each other, and we enjoy each other’s sense of humor. It really was, I looked forward to it every time. No matter if we were dragging the same question through a second hour of questioning or revision.
It was so important, and we all learned so much through the process, too. As much as we’re subject matter experts in our, you know, individual fields, we learned so much from each other, and so much from you, Keith, and from Bryce as well. It was a labor, but it was a labor of love, and definitely something that I think all of us really want to give this gift, you know, certainly to ourselves—something that we’re really going to benefit from—but certainly give it to the field. Samaritan helps get to organize and assist volunteer programs in being the best they can be. A lot of it is that kind of altruistic, but really that feel-good component that I think all of us got out of it. That was a big part of it for me.
Sara Flores: It was Friday night. We’d have meetings Friday afternoon sometime at, like, 4pm. Nobody wants to be on a meeting at 4pm, but there we were, laughing hysterically sometimes about the smallest things. A lot happens in your life over two years of meeting with the same people. Right? We got puppies, some of us got puppies, like, our kids were going through stuff. As we were working on this, we were also sharing our, like, life story. It was really kind of great and magical in that sense, and I just… there were so many moments where we’d just laugh… and then we’d be like, “okay, we can’t stop laughing, like, we have to be done for the day.” We’re not getting anything more done.
It was just… it was really that camaraderie, I think, that really pushed us. Because if it wasn’t fun, we were not gonna do it, right? And if we weren’t all so personally connected with each other, we weren’t gonna see this through. And so it was those, like, moments of joy that really brought us, right, to that finish line and made us bond. And… yeah, it’s just… yeah, tacos and margaritas forever.
Maryellen Brady: Yeah.
Barbara Rutherford: Benchmark Beauties.
Maryellen Brady: Yeah, I think the… just like everyone else said, the padding on the meeting so that we could have some therapy time to be like, “hey guys, how’s it going?” Or… or laughing through one of these, or just go, “okay, we gotta get back to work.” I also enjoyed, when out of everyone on the call, Bryce would be the one to say, “alright guys, let’s get through these last couple questions here.” And we’re like, “no, no more questions, please, Bryce!” Was always a fun time.
I was just mentioning earlier to you guys before we started this that you, Bryce and Keith, weren’t a part of the commercial, quote-unquote, that we created to try to get the word out, but we did have quite a laugh on the day. I can’t even tell you, how many takes did we do for that? For, like, a 5-minute, “please take our survey,” was just, I think that was a really good… it was a really good day. Like, I think we were all a little bit stressed out about, like, nervous about it, and we just were laughing through it. And then… you know, not to get to the very end, but that celebration, when the survey launched over tacos and margaritas, was a really nice way to celebrate and launch the survey, looking back at the what, two years of working on it. So, I think those are some of mine.
Keith Leonard: I’m so impressed, and so, I mean, you really, the three of you took it, ran with it, and worked with Beryl and some great people at Beryl to make it happen. I mean, we’re talking about a lot of work already, but then to refine it again—if I remember, you narrowed down those questions. You guys were kind to, like, update us about what was happening, got the actual survey out into Qualtrics and out into the world, and then came back. Assessed it, and produced a report, which we’re gonna see here just, you know, next week.
So, you know, I think… I am interested in to see what happens with the report and the impacts and the stories about how people are gonna use it, and work with everyone in management to understand. Because I do think, unfortunately, people see the impact volunteer services has, but I don’t think they understand the work that goes into making that happen. I’ve never worked on an implementation where somebody in another department—be it IT, or HR, or compliance—aren’t actually absolutely impressed and blown away with how much volunteer services does. And, you know, I think we’re all in this because we believe that volunteers can have this massive impact in the world, and are proud about that.
So, I’m super excited to see how this… the next phase of it, and looking forward to, you know, as I think Shaz has a great example of how you carry it out, and we could see in her survey it change over time. I can imagine the same thing’s gonna happen with this survey, and it’s fascinating. Any other kind of thoughts you have as we wrap this up on the impact and what you’re looking forward to?
Maryellen Brady: I don’t think we should move forward without at least acknowledging the hard work that Brittany did for us. Brittany Lacks at Beryl. She helped us organize it even more, and she helped us… Jason Wolf believed in all of this, which would not have moved forward without him believing in the work that we’re doing, too. But Brittany kept us on track, and also made sure that what we promised in our pitch to everyone really happened, and we were able to deliver. What we are delivering is the full report, the overview, the executive one-pager for everyone. And, I think Brittany understood how important it was for us to make sure we… this is our name that we’re putting on this, and so we need to make sure that we can back this up. I think she really helped us and had a great sense of humor with all of us as well, and could see the frustration, and really helped us. She worked with the vendor to help this happen, and did some of the work that we didn’t have to do at that end. So I want to make sure that we acknowledge how amazing Brittany was for all of this as well.
And the impact… I’m just hoping we’re gonna see what that looks like, really soon. I’m hoping that it’s what everyone needed and wanted, and we’ll see what this looks like afterward, right? Are we doing round two?
Sara Flores: Do it in round two.
Maryellen Brady: Yeah, Sara.
Barbara Rutherford: What’s happening.
Sara Flores: Yeah. We’re doing round two, we have to keep it… you know, I think, for me, it was… like, I can’t… Beryl’s support, right? Jason and Brittany were just fabulous with all of this. And I think, you know, when Jason’s like, “our goal is 100 responses.” And I, like, part of me was heartbroken. He’s like, “that’s a success if we get 100 responses.” And I was like, “no, but I wanted more.” First year, you know, we wanted thousands, as Keith mentioned earlier. And then, what did we end up with? I think over 300 responses. And we were like…
Barbara Rutherford: Yeah, close to 300.
Sara Flores: That was, like, a moment where I was like, we did the right thing. There was, you know… and so… like, I just remember that call of hearing our response rate when the survey closed, and just being, like, we did… this was all these years, right? We gained all these friendships, and we got the result that we wanted, and so that was just an aha moment of, like, “you did the right work, right? You did a good job, like… you know, keep going.” And so I’m… I’m excited to see this grow, the partnerships that we’ve all made grow over time, and, yeah, I just… there’s a bright future for this survey. I’m looking forward to all the data that we get in the future.
Keith Leonard: Love it. Barbara, you get the final word.
Barbara Rutherford: Lucky me. Yeah, all of the above. I mean, again, the partnerships that we’ve had from the very beginning. Keith and Bryce and the support and the organization, and then going to Beryl with Jason and Brittany is… it really was more than I would have ever expected in terms of enthusiasm, and really cheering us on, and keeping us on track, and not bringing us down when we have these really grand, lofty goals, but, you know, really wanting to make sure that those things are happening. And the impact is something that I’m just super excited about. I am so thrilled that the entirety of this experience for the last two years… I think we have always talked about it being more than a one-year survey. We know from the very beginning, you know, starting off with a survey that might have taken 3 hours to complete, we know that there’s a lot of questions to be asked, and it’s only the starting point. The fact that it’s really being considered as a multi-year effort speaks to the support that we have, to the infrastructure that we’ve really built in terms of partnerships and all of the work. The vast intelligence of all of these people combined to make it happen. It’s just… it’s an extraordinary thing. It is quite magical, actually. I think Maryellen is the one who said that initially.
Keith Leonard: Well… Wonderful. I want to thank all three of you, Barbara and Sara, Maryellen. Thank you for joining us today. We appreciate, you know, reflecting a little bit on the survey. I agree, I think the impact of the survey, I have high hopes. And I’m looking forward to future surveys as we can kind of look at the longevity and the growth of this… of volunteerism in healthcare. So, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re gonna call it a wrap, and you know, we’ll see you again on the… on the next podcast, maybe about the benchmark survey again. So, we’ll see. Thank you so much, everyone.
Barbara Rutherford: Thank you.
Sara Flores: Thank you.
Maryellen Brady: Thanks.