CUSTOMER STORY
How Dodgeball Canada built a feedback-driven community
Dodgeball Canada and Dodgeball Toronto went from scattered feedback to a national tournament standard — by asking their community the right questions.
US HEADQUARTERS
Canada
COMPANY SIZE
Volunteer-led
INDUSTRY
Non-Profit / Hospitality
USE CASES
OVERVIEW
Dodgeball Canada is the national governing body supporting athletes nationwide, while Dodgeball Toronto operates as a premier local league and competitive tournament destination. As both organizations expanded to serve a rapidly growing and diverse community, they needed a reliable way to capture member needs. Using SurveyMonkey, they transformed community feedback into a repeatable decision-making process, helping leaders improve programs and tournaments with data-driven insight.
Established gold standard tournament practices to elevate athlete experience
Boosted player satisfaction through community centered models
Turned actionable member data into confident leadership decisions
THE CHALLENGE
Making decisions that reflected the entire community, not just the loudest voices
As Dodgeball Canada and Dodgeball Toronto continued to grow and serve wide demographics as national and international tournament destinations, one challenge became increasingly difficult: understanding how to best serve the community as a whole.
Feedback was everywhere and arrived buried in scattered channels from various players, emails from coaches, conversations at tournaments or stories passed along by volunteers. Marc Cizravi, Director of Player and Sport Development for Dodgeball Canada and Owner of Dodgeball Toronto, kept hearing the same message that “More isn’t necessarily better. Players wanted more meaningful games, not just more quantity of them”. But hearing something and being able to act on it were two different things.
"Before SurveyMonkey collecting feedback was janky to say the least. It was fragmented. It was stories here or there," Marc recalls. "We were having conversations, but we weren't tracking things very well."
Shadae Berkley, Vice President of Dodgeball Canada, and General Manager of Dodgeball Toronto, saw the problem from the board level, and it was systemic. At the leadership level, the challenge ran even deeper. Without a consistent way to collect and analyze feedback, important decisions were often shaped by whoever happened to be in the room.
Board members brought valuable perspectives from their own regions and networks, but there was no reliable way to know whether those viewpoints reflected the broader community. "Before it was all just guesswork. The opinions you were getting and the feedback you were getting was directly related to who was on the board, what the geographical makeup of the board was and the circles that board members were interacting with." recalls Shadae.
The organizations faced a cascade of interconnected challenges. They were growing. Local tournaments drew in excess of 500 players twice a year. Six concurrent national squads ran programs for roughly 150 athletes, travelling from all across the country. Volunteers managed events across the country. Yet, the organizations weren’t tracking feedback systemically, couldn’t see patterns, couldn’t validate athlete investment and were making decisions in a vacuum, unable to ground them in community reality.
For a volunteer-led organization serving thousands of people, many of whom were making real personal investments, guesswork wasn't acceptable. Yet it was all they had. Without systematic listening, the organization couldn't evolve with confidence.
“You have to make sure people's voices are being heard. You need to understand what they like, what they don't like, and most importantly, why. Without that, I can't be successful in my role.”
Marc Cizravi
Director of Player and Sport Development
Dodgeball Canada
THE ANSWER
Operationalizing feedback into organizational decisions
The organizations had outgrown their own decision-making process. They needed a way to listen to their community systematically and make decisions grounded in what their community actually needed, not what leadership guessed they needed.
Within weeks of implementing SurveyMonkey, feedback collection became operational. "[SurveyMonkey] is a direct part of our event and our operations run sheets," Marc says. "It's on a schedule that immediately after [an event] the survey has to go out. It's a regular part of our workflow. It seems almost alien to not have it."
Using SurveyMonkey, the organizations built targeted questionnaires for different audiences, events and program types surveying players, spectators, coaches, and staff separately. They asked personalized questions with logic and branching, allowing them to capture distinct experiences and challenges. The data revealed patterns invisible to intuition alone further deepening their understanding.
By analyzing SurveyMonkey feedback, Dodgeball Canada and Dodgeball Toronto redesigned their events into a tiered tournament structure, a format Marc now calls their operational "gold standard." Nationally, survey insights led the organization to give athletes direct agency over squad selection through open dialogue rather than coach assignments. Beyond tournament operations, community data now actively anchors board governance and high-level strategy. As Shadae highlights, visual feedback allows leadership "to put data and facts of what the community is desiring...against our own opinions and group think."
Forming a hypothesis didn't disappear. But it became secondary to listening. "SurveyMonkey has helped us stay curious, because it gives us a platform to just ask what we want. Why not ask the question? Why not get the perspective?" Shadae reflects. "There's a world where we come from completely different sides of the spectrum. But curiosity encourages collaboration and meeting in the middle."
“Being able to have meaningful conversations, understand how people are really feeling, and build continuous feedback into the way we operate has been transformational. I can't imagine doing it in such an organized and effective way without SurveyMonkey.”
Marc Cizravi
Director of Player and Sport Development
Dodgeball Canada
THE RESULTS
Growth happens when organizations listen
The Club Championships, Dodgeball Canada's flagship tournament, expanded from 20 teams to 60 teams with representation from all 10 provinces. That growth didn't happen by accident. It happened because feedback loops drove continuous improvement. Because the organization asked, listened, and acted. Because decisions were grounded in what the community actually needed.
But the most telling result showed up in behavior and commitment. Athletes kept coming back. Teams kept investing. The organization kept growing. The national program kept improving. This wasn't a coincidence, it was the direct result of decisions grounded in what SurveyMonkey's research revealed, what players actually valued, where experiences differed, and what drove retention.
More importantly, the organization's culture shifted. Research moved from "nice-to-have" to foundational. Decisions now began with a question: What does the data tell us? Where is there misalignment between what we think and what the community actually needs?
"I can say unequivocally we wouldn't see our success without it," Marc reflects. "If we weren't having these intimate conversations, if we weren't gathering the data, we wouldn't be where we are."
For Shadae, the shift meant the organization could finally serve its entire community, not just the voices that happened to be heard. "SurveyMonkey has really allowed us to ensure that we are getting the feedback and perspectives of everybody across Canada, regardless of who is in that position of power. The decisions are being informed by the community and not just by the board members who sit on the board."
The breakthrough wasn't about technology. It was about choosing to listen.
Get the insights you need to grow your events and community
Customer Feedback
Understand what motivates your participants and drive long-term retention.
Voice of the customer
Replace guesswork with actionable data to make smarter organization decisions.
Need an enterprise-grade solution?
SurveyMonkey Enterprise provides additional features like IT administration, SSO, user controls and permissions, HIPAA compliance and more.
NPS, Net Promoter & Net Promoter Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.