The Cabinet Office commissioned a national survey of third sector organisations from MORI and the results for Coventry are now available to view on line. Nearly 50,000 organisations took part between September and December 2008 via postal and on-line surveys. Comparisons can be made against the national average and other areas.

Coventry generally fares slightly worse than average for many of the questions. For example, after removing "Don't know / not applicable / no answer given", the results for satisfaction with "the opportunity for 3 year or longer funding / contracts for your organisation" (with some other areas shown for comparison) were:

So generally everywhere the picture is fairly grim, with the majority of respondents who gave an opinion being dissatisfied. Coventry is worse off than Birmingham according to people's perceptions, but slightly better than Leicester.

Care has to be taken with interpretation (some respondents may be in receipt of funding but frustrated with its duration, whilst some may simply be frustrated the lack of opportunity to secure funding anyway), and the data comes with huge caveats around statistical significance in making comparisons between areas. Nevertheless there is clearly still a long way to go nationally as well as in Coventry in addressing these issues.

Satisfaction with support from other third sector bodies in Coventry (e.g. VAC) is however considerably higher (51% positive) than the national average (42%), but otherwise Coventry's figures lag slightly behind the overall national average on most issues, particularly funding-related.

To view the figures, click here: http://www.nstso.com/analysis/tool/