The most important question you could ask your community members
PLUS; why we love filling out forms, and a copy-and-paste example of a community member survey, just for you ;)
Last week, Substack launched surveys. Hurrah!
For those of us who have been working with surveys for a long time, this is HUGE. But from my experience, many folks who want to build strong, deep, and engaged communities don’t fully understand, or know about, how powerful a good community survey of your members can be.
A smart member survey can be the difference between interstellar community-first storytelling, and a project that fails to ever really take off. What’s more, a community survey isn’t just something you want to do at the start of something new: they can be sent every six months or so to make sure you are really in sync with who you are talking to, and smaller surveys are a simple means to gut check your way forward.
Before we begin, a small update. I was so bowled over by the response to my post 10 lessons on the creative practice I learnt from my artist husband. It seems like many of you are really enjoying the story-writers’ scurry—which started as a small experimental corner of my Substack to dig deeper into the craft and business of writing. So I’ve decided to make this an opt-out part of the main newsletter, rather than opt-in. You can opt out of this sub-section at any time, in your subscription settings.
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And now, onto today’s sujet du jour: the community survey.
Let’s get into it…
Why survey?
Here’s the fun thing I learnt from the editorial research wizards at Condé Nast: people LOVE to fill out a form. Once you start thinking about forms, surveys, questionnaires, you’ll see them everywhere. Compared to the thousands of decisions we struggle over on a daily basis, form-filling can feel somewhat breezy: an easy choice, A, or B. No wrong answer. With each click you accomplish a little goal… and get closer to the end: applying for a dentist; signing up to a new app; getting some tax relief. It just feels productive. We humans love these little tasks, and entering information about ourselves gives us a jolt of dopamine akin to receiving a social “like”.
But for you, as the founder, if you get enough members to fill out your form you’ll have something really valuable—quantitative and qualitative community data. This will not only give you insights about your community members to understand them better, a good community survey will shape your editorial and community strategy for your project’s current iteration and for its future.
Just one or two key insights could help you stand out on the internet, and—more importantly—keep your community members engaged, returning, and spreading the word about how great your project is (retention and growth!).
Types of survey—does it matter?
I never, EVER start a community-based role without trying to ask a bunch of questions of my community members.
At Instagram, this was mostly pretty manual. As community manager for EMEA (yes that’s Europe, Middle East and Africa), I canvassed as many community members as I could—interviewing them for the blog about how they use Instagram, but also asking them random questions about their lives, what secret feature they wished we’d launch, what other apps they loved, and what they’d tell the founders if they met them. I emailed, phone-called, and met many of them in person.
I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was doing was what you might call market research. I’ve never worked on the commercial side of things—in advertising, or in user design—but my understanding, from talking to some of my former colleagues who worked in strategy, is the brand is trying to figure out its customer. They want to build a strong picture of who exactly they are talking to—what they eat, where they shop, what media diet they consume, what kind of person they are attracted to… everything. Where this work differs, I think, from community strategy, is commercial brands are usually solely trying to figure out their future potential customer, not their existing ones, which is something you can also do with community questionnaires, and knowing your future member is part of the outcome, but it’s not really the goal.
At Condé Nast, the aforementioned research wizards and I were trying to find out how to reach and speak to (survey!) teenagers about why they weren’t reading Vogue anymore. I wanted to show to the somewhat blinkered senior editors that young people weren’t engaging with the magazine, and find out why. Instead of sending out surveys on the usual platforms we had—which we knew they weren’t looking at—we needed to be more radical.
So researchers and I (and the then head of audience research) grabbed a few roving mics and a video cams and went out every day to the centre of Oxford Circus to spot-survey people on the street. This is research at its best and most scrappy. Or in more editorial terms: vox-popping. Plus: it was fun! We were able to grab young, cool, fashionable-looking kids and ask them loads of questions about social media, their media diet, where they shopped, who they followed, and—most importantly—if they had ever read Vogue, and if not, why not. Even better, since this was Oxford Circus in central London, a lot of the young people were also international visitors, and our research pool was instantly non-UK centric (which was good since we were strategising for 25 Vogues all over the world.)
We recorded hundreds of interviews, and smooshed them into 2-3 five-minute videos to send to the Vogue digital editors. They were shocked. They shared them all over their teams telling them they HAD to watch this. Muttered about them in corridors. What I’d done was actually quite bold. But it also gave me much-needed data to backup my requests to executives to allow me to try new ideas to reach these people—like helping to set up the first Snapchat Discover channels and hiring motion graphics designers, and start a new Instagram account which didn’t just feature celebrities from the magazine but actually the young people themselves.
Ever since, in every new role that I start with some kind of survey. Or find out if one was done recently. (More often than not, it hasn’t.) Later, with tools like Typeform and surveymonkey this became incredibly simple. I also sent out surveys for brands like Vogue using Instagram’s native tools, and now we can do native surveys on Substack.
I’ve developed surveys for the Guardian, Vogue, and tech-world startup clients like Beams, Backer, Unfabled, and more recently Substack (you may have completed it here!). When I was a freelance consultant I always sent an introductory survey before ever speaking to a potential new client.
The key point here is: you want to meet your community member where they are at. There’s no point sending a survey to better understand octogenarian newlyweds via Discord. You’ll want to create noticeboard posters, and flyers and put out ads in the relevant papers. Go to where your community members are—and that’s why Substack native surveys are so great for Substack writers building communities here.
Oh and the really fun part: I’ve never not read the survey responses with utter relish and delight. SO. MUCH. INSIGHT. That moment, when you first start reading the responses is incredible. A total rush. Trust me on this: surveys will always be a secret weapon for community building.
What are the actual goals + outcomes of a survey
We talked about gaining powerful insights about your community members. But here are some real objectives and outcomes to think about—especially if you need to convince a manager or power-that-be.
If we were running a survey together, I’d suggest we survey to:
Get to know our community better: to understand our current and target audience profile (for you or wider stakeholders in your project or business)
Identify key passionate community members for profile pieces for editorial content
Gain useful insights to shape our editorial content
let’s put some numbers on these objectives to get gauge how well the survey does:
Substantial qualitative feedback on current users and user profiles: 10% of current community respond.
Identify key passionate community members and share their stories in our editorial content: find ~20 people to interview for profile pieces.
Gain useful insights to shape our editorial content: understand 5 key content areas we should focus on, formats and types of content which are better received and one or two market insights to help the brand/project stand out from the crowd.
So now we have looked at why we might survey, and when and how, let’s get into the detail of what exactly we could ask our community members — including the ONE QUESTION we absolutely mustn’t forget…