OnTheWight is fortunate enough to have been picked to take part in Nesta’s Destination Local project, which has been a fascinating process.

Under the programme, we’ve selected four diverse projects to run, but they retain a link: To understand our readers better and what they like to read; Broaden the readership; Deepen the interaction with our articles; and to Increase income.

To satisfy the first, one project we chose was to survey our readers – to find out more about them; what they thought of our Isle of Wight news publication; to understand what content they liked; and to get a glimpse at what they’d like to see us to do more of in the future.

Well, that’s all we anticipated finding out. We ended up with an unexpected bonus – one that gave us a lot of joy – loads of readers saying lots of lovely things about us.

Those producing local news content on a daily basis can sometimes find that you don’t hear back from your readers all that frequently, leading you to wonder if what you’re providing is appreciated.

OK, they’ve left over 130,000 comments – but those are about the articles – and yes, you can see good traffic via analytics –  it’s pretty dry and disconnected from the actual reader – so what do they actually think of your publication?

If you find yourself in that position, I’m glad to tell you that a Readers’ Survey could be your tonic.

Five easy steps

In these articles we run you through the following, to lift you to readers’ survey nirvana:

• Pick your survey tool
• Decide – Short or Long survey
• Creating your survey (inc picking questions)
• Promoting it
• Studying the results

Pick your Survey tool

For us, this was utterly simple – TypeForm. We’ve found nothing to compare for User experience, especially on mobile. 

Filling out a TypeForm survey is a pleasure, making selections and changes as easy as can be. Lots of other survey tools are the opposite.

How often are choices that simple with Technology?

Decide: Short or long survey?

The last thing that we wanted was to make filling out the survey a chore for our readers, so our first inclination was to create a relatively short one. 

Once we started compiling the questions we’d like readers to answer, it soon became clear that if we did go short, we have to re-survey readers over and again to fulfil our desires. The killer for us – if we did this, how could we tie answers to survey 2 to survey 1?

Long had to be the way forward – but this was only possible because filling out a TypeForm survey, even a long one, just doesn’t feel bothersome.

A realisation, nay fear, we had was that if we ran a long survey, what would happen if they got bored before reaching the end of the survey and therefore not hitting the all-important Submit button – we’d lose it all. Certainly not what we wanted.

The way we worked around this: Split the survey up into three. This gave the advantage of allowing the person filling out the survey to take a break, to come back to it later, when they had more time. 

We were pleased that results showed the drop-out rate was only about 5% between sections.

Working with TypeForm support (who were excellent and super-responsive), we found we had to ask readers for their email addresses and names, to enable us to tie together the data from each section. This meant us having to compromise on our desire for anonymity. We took time to get the text right to explain this to those filling out the survey.

Next part

Rather than swamp you with one long article, we thought we’d split this up into manageable chunks.

What’s coming up next is the picking of questions, filtering them out, ordering them and grouping them; How to go about getting people to fill in your survey; and The joy of looking over the results and learning from them.

Simon Perry runs OnTheWight, an online Isle of Wight news publication, with his wife, Sally. They’ve been running the site for over ten years and have published over 25,000 articles about the Isle of Wight.

Homepage image accompanying this article is copyright The Bees.