Scottish Voluntary Sector Tracker — a longitudinal panel survey of Scottish third/voluntary sector organisations.

We require suppliers to undertake a panel survey every two months for the duration of 12 months, six survey phases in total. The surveys must be carried out in a manner agreed with the project manager, but most likely online or by telephone, to an agreed timescale. The survey will consist of a set of approximately twenty fixed closed questions with the majority having multiple prompted responses to choose from. For each survey phase, we would expect to change a small number of the questions, perhaps three or four, in response to current events. We would also like the option to add one open question in each survey phase, suppliers should factor that into their pricing.

We require suppliers to construct and maintain the panel. The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations will advise on what type and size of organisations will be required to make the panel representative of the sector. The panel can largely be drawn from the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations membership and wider networks and therefore the supplier need not source contact details.

The size of the panel needs to reflect the diversity of the Scottish third sector and be sufficiently large to support statistical confidence in the overall analysis. It also needs to be large enough to enable for the analysis to be broken down to some degree at sectoral and regional levels. Accordingly, we expect the panel size to be in the range of 400-600 organisations. Suppliers should however advise what they think appropriate, based on their understanding of the scale and composition of the Third Sector in Scotland.

As far as possible, the panel should comprise the same organisations in each survey phase, with new representative organisations recruited if an organisation no longer wishes to participate.

In addition to the raw data, the supplier must provide summary data tables from the scripted questionnaire.