Survey Results: What We Learned from You and What’s Changing
Our January survey results were amazing. As many of you know, we sent a SurveyMonkey link to over 1,300 people and received 129 responses.
This post summarizes the survey results and then lists each question and interesting comments/responses. Feel free to comment on our plans by either posting a comment to this blog or e-mail me (bdotson @ webmedley.com).
The reason we’re publishing the results is so you know what we learned & how we’re responding and so you can benefit from generalized info about your peers.
Allow me to kick this off with my favorite comment from the survey. From the section on 2009 goals: “…win a few friends, love a few enemies…”
Survey Summary
Most clients said we’re doing a good to great job as a web host. Our areas for improvement are speed in response, technical knowledge of our customer support team (our first line of response), a need for additional designs for our content management system (DotNetNuke), easier calendaring, and more video training.
Since the initial survey results arrived three weeks ago, we’ve started to address these needs by:
- Adding a monthly support survey – if you request support in any calendar month, you’ll get an e-mail from me asking you to rate the support. I’ll use the information to manage support times and responses better.
- We’re investigating a new support software system that could help us manage requests and build a knowledgebase.
- Created support cases for people who requested help through the survey. This was not easy to do since not all survey respondents left e-mail or names. If we missed anyone, please contact me.
- Created a server migration checklist in the event we ever move data centers again
- Started developing a web topics training plan so you’ll get the ongoing help you requested. More info in future posts.
- Developed a site review worksheet so we can let you know how your site performs, ranks in the search engines, and what may be changed to help you achieve your goals. This isn’t just a search engine report – it’s a whole site report. There will be no charge for this and I’ll post more info about this in another blog post.
- Developed a search engine and advertising program for you – there are no cost and for fee elements to this program. Again, I’ll post more on it in a future blog post.
- Started lining up third party providers unrelated to WebMedley to help you address needs we cannot: general advertising, outreach tools, member engagement, and more. We will mention these providers in other blog posts.
OK, let’s move to the individual questions and summary of responses for each. Are you happy with our performance? 86% of the respondents said “Yes” and of course, I’d like this number to be above 95%. We received a number of comments about how we’re doing great and others about how we could be better. 55 people took the time to let us know specifics and I appreciate the feedback.
The next two questions and responses are related: What are your 2009 goals and what does your organization struggle with? The overwhelming responses were: gaining new members (esp. youth), increasing participation in events, dealing with finances, and using the web site to help with operational items (documents, finances, events, etc).
One of the training topics will be a video related to goal setting. Many responses listed items like “increase membership”, but failed to state exact numbers. This is probably due to the informality of the survey; however, when setting goals, its important to list the numbers in their exact form so everyone knows and can strive for them.
What do you use your web site for? The results for the rest were:
- An online brochure for people to learn about us, our services, and values 99.2%
- Event registration 18.9%
- Donations 12.6%
- Selling goods or services 8.7%
- Newsletter sign-ups 21.3%
- Coordinating people (volunteering, planning, etc) 26.0%
- Providing password-protected info to select groups of people 15.0%
There were many other open-ended responses: sharing photos, event management, document management, video, and more.
Is your organization a place of worship? Over 90% of the responses were “Yes”.
If a person answered “yes” then he/she got another set of questions the secular folks did not.
What is the average weekend attendance for your organization? Most respondents have between 50-300 weekend service members. Some folks were under 50 and about the same number were over 750.
Does your organization use church management software? This was about a 50-50 response. There was no overwhelming software provider for the 50% that do use a management system.
Who edits your web site? The top answers were “Volunteer”, “Outreach/Communications”, “Office Administrator”, and “Pastor” in that order. A number of organizations have multiple site editors and content contributors. This is a great sign because it means the organization is not reliant on only one person and that the site is integrated into the operation of the organization.
If you could pick one thing to improve about our company or service, what would it be? This got a number of responses. They are summarized at the top of this post.
How often do you edit your web site? Almost 50% edit once per week, and 25% edit either once a day or once a month.
When asked if it would help if we edited your site, only a small group said “Yes”. The answer surprised me because we get quite a few requests for assistance with edits. I confused the request for technical help with a desire to “just do it”.
The next question, is there anything else we can do for you? Yielded similar answers to the other questions.
The question about training topics was very interesting. Here’s how the responses appear:
| Yes | No Thanks | |
| Fund raising for your organization | 52% | 48% |
| Adding video/media to your site | 86% | 14% |
| Setting up a blog | 60% | 40% |
| Better search engine rankings | 66% | 34% |
| Creating online training/courses for your members | 58% | 42% |
| Managing documents online | 65% | 35% |
| Establishing profiles for social sites like FaceBook, Twitter, etc | 42% | 58% |
| Other content management systems we offer (WordPress, Joomla, etc) | 38% | 62% |
| Sending your content to us to update your site | 21% | 79% |
Naturally, we’re going to build our blog posts and other training based on these responses. It did surprise me that less than 50% want help with establishing social media when we had such a strong request for engaging youth and new members of a congregation. I’ll post more on some surprising information (to me, at least) and the prevalence of FaceBook and Twitter in the church and workplace.
Our final question was related to those who would like one of our t-shirts. As of this blog post, we’ve shipped 127!
Thanks to everyone for the time, insight, and participation.
Bill
