SURVEY – Understanding a Maturing Community Shares Market

The Community Shares Unit (CSU), along with a number of partners, is carrying out research to improve understanding of community shares. This is the first in-depth study of the community shares market since 2014. The Survey, ‘Understanding a Maturing Community Shares Market‘ is now live and the CSU are looking to hear from representatives from community enterprises and investors alike – all those who would like to comment are being asked to respond and share with networks of clients, colleagues, friends and family.

Your views are incredibly valuable to the research. With your help, the CSU will be able to:

  • Find out more about the effectiveness of share offers to date, both financially and in terms of their wider social impact and community benefit.
  • Explore challenges and opportunities for community share offers; including the added value that institutional investment like the Booster Programme can generate.
  • Help community shares projects to better understand investor motivations and behaviour.

Taking part is easy

  1. Complete the survey on behalf of your organisation online by Sunday 15th March 2020 – it takes between 10-15 minutes and is accessible here via a computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone.
  1. Invite community shares investors to take part too. Please help investors to have their say too by sending on the survey link and encouraging them to take part. If investors participate in the survey and refer to your organisation in their response, we will aggregate their data and share those findings with you. It is hoped that such information would be a helpful insight into the characteristics and motivations of shareholders and be helpful to the ongoing running of your organisation.

About the survey

The questionnaire is being administered by IFF Research, an independent research organisation, on behalf of CSU. All the information you provide will be held confidentially and used for research purposes only.

It will not be possible to identify any organisations, groups or individual respondents in published results. Under data protection law you will have the right to have a copy of your data, change your data, or withdraw from the research at any point. For more information, please see the IFF research website

If you experience any technical problems, or have any queries on the survey, please contact the IFF research team on 020 7250 3025 or email them If you would like to verify the authenticity of this survey, please email Isla McCulloch at the Community Share Unit

The survey is here and there is more information about the study here.