🔶 #30: "A newsroom that listens"
Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter.
IT'S SURVEY TIME ! 📝🎁🥳
Forgive my seemingly unjustified excitement, but I've been wanting to learn more about your relationship with this newsletter for a while – primarily to learn what I can do better and how I can be more useful to you.
Now, if you regularly hang out in this place called "The Internet", you get surveys all the time... and I know it's annoying.
(In the next few paragraphs, I tell you a little about how I approach the creation of a good survey. Not interested? Jump straight to the survey, and scroll down to the seven links.)
Honestly, when I decide to respond to a survey it's for one of two reasons:
- I cannot wait to let the sender know how displeased I am with their services, or how bad my experience with them was. (I'm looking at you, UK Visas & Immigration.)
- I want to support the sender, because I know how useful it is to learn more about your audience, users, or customers.
But even when I start with the best intentions, sometimes I quit halfway through because the survey is too long, the questions are poorly designed, or they feel 100% extractive.
Over the course of my career, I have created dozens of surveys – mostly for participants of programmes I was organising – and I learned that creating a good survey requires to accept that no question gets the right to be included if you cannot explain clearly and convincingly what you will do with the responses.
A question might be included to give you the insights you need to improve something about your product or service; to score an easy marketing win (99% of readers are likely or very likely to recommend the newsletter to a friend!); or to surface needs that you didn't even know you could meet.
Most importantly, a good survey should also include questions that, other than providing insights to you, also give to the people taking the survey an opportunity to learn something about themselves, encouraging some level of self-reflection.
To show you what I mean, each question in the survey is accompanied by one line in which I explain why I am asking that question. (WTQ? = Why this question?)
There are ten questions – some are open and some are multiple-choice. No question is mandatory. You can browse the survey and decide that you only have time to answer one or two. That's fine, and it's still going to be very helpful.
(Obviously, if you answer most or all of the questions, I will have much more information to improve the newsletter and learn how else I can support your work.)
I'll leave the survey open for a couple of weeks, and after some time to analyse your feedback, I promise to share with you what I have learned – and what I plan to do about it.
Ready? Here you go:
I debated whether to include the seven links today or keep it just to the survey, but I already did not include the seven links in the last edition, and I didn't want to skip them twice in a row.
Maybe from the survey I will learn that I'm already overwhelming you with so many links that I should have skipped them again 😉 See? Fill in that survey and the experience of this newsletter will become so much better.
See you next week! 👋
