Surveys are the easiest (and cheapest) tool to get more out of your audiences
In today’s rapidly evolving media landscape, understanding news audiences’ preferences, behaviors and opinions has become paramount for media organizations seeking to effectively engage and retain readers. Surveys are an essential tool for newsrooms to understand the minds of news consumers and empower media professionals to tailor their content, delivery strategies, and engagement tactics to foster a mutually beneficial relationship between journalism and its audiences.
The audience and distribution team at the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) has collected and analyzed dozens of recent audience surveys from newsrooms that are members of the INN Network. We’ve collaborated with audience experts and consulted with academic researchers on consumer behavior and news attitudes to understand how to get the most out of surveys. As we roll out our new survey template and guide, here are some ways news outlets found surveys most helpful, explained their audiences in new and valuable ways, and set their marketing and engagement strategies going forward.
Understand the complex profile of your audience
Surveys are the most effective tool to understand the profiles of your readers, but distilling that information for editorial and business development within a newsroom comes with many caveats.
Stephanie Edgerly, professor at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, has done extensive research on surveys and has come to see demographic data as supplementary to other information captured through surveys.
“Demographics are always the last step. And often, not the most interesting thing to me. I like to start with a behavior, and then you fill out their motivations,” Edgerly said. “I don’t like starting with women, for example, because then you’re thinking about women in a singular monolith kind of way.”
Instead of identity-based demographics, INN’s audience team has found questions on housing, employment, and family structure to be richer context to inform reader habits and preferences.
Ken Paulman, director at Energy News Network, said the organization uses surveys, in part, to understand how their reporting is being used professionally.
“When you look at just demographics, our newsletter audience is older, male, and white. That’s not an exciting story to tell funders,” Paulman said. “Policy nonprofit readers and those employed in the energy sector are more diverse and reflective of those industries. We isolate how those groups use the stories and we are able to better serve and build from there.”
When used in tandem with public data, your demographics can take on a different meaning that contextualizes constituencies of readers, giving teams a better understanding of how their writing is impacting subsects of the population.
Get the whole organization connecting with the audience
Through survey data, editorial teams can gain a better understanding of what readers want to consume, which reporting projects have had the most significant impact and how the community feels about your organization.
It also provides an opportunity to reconnect with readers.
“It was a morale booster for our writers to be able to see how their journalism is making a difference in the lives of everyday people,” Nichole Dobo, audience editor at The Hechinger Report, said. “It really renewed their energy and excitement. It led to organic ways to talk to them about audience information needs and build empathy for readers.”
Dobo focused on collecting qualitative impact notes, asking “How did our reporting help you?” Those anecdotes were helpful on the development and fundraising side, both to educate donors and foundations on the success of their work and validate their stated mission.
“Readers don’t always know that we want to know that our reporting made a difference,” Dobo said. “Impact notes are important for our development and grant writing because we can explain the impact we had that we wouldn’t otherwise know about.”
At the Evanston Roundtable, surveys yielded significant changes in marketing and direct giving campaigns.
“Surveys helped us understand that we haven’t made a strong enough pitch for why we cannot exist without readers and how dependent we are on readers to support our work,” executive editor Tacy Quattrocki said. “The survey confirms that we didn’t have the urgency in our messages that we needed. People were giving to other nonprofit news organizations and not us, and yet saying they appreciated our coverage.”
After implementing a more direct and aggressive fundraising strategy, the Evanston Roundtable had an overperforming direct giving campaign, with shockingly low unsubscribe rates, despite the increase in email volume.
Leverage surveys to form deeper connections
Surveys should be able to provide information that helps newsrooms understand their relationship with their audiences: where there is room to grow, and where they should focus their marketing and development efforts.
The Hechinger Report distributed surveys through newsletters, which focus on different sub-genres of education news. The first survey went out to their Early Childhood Education newsletter.
“We got hundreds of new ground-level sources on the early childhood beat, who said yes, you can contact me for a story. Which is a huge win for editorial,” Dobo said. “The new sources aren’t wonks or think tank people, but are like, Suzy, who works in a preschool in Ohio, which are the hardest sources sometimes to get. They are able to bubble up the kinds of story ideas that only can originate from the ground level.”
Surveys can provide substantial data about broad audience trends, but they can also connect you to individuals for whom your work has had a direct impact. They allow all parts of the newsroom to see their readers as distinct consumers, who have individualized appreciation for and draw uses from their work, which epitomizes nonprofit newsrooms as more than just journalism, but a public service.
For all news organizations operating with limited resources, the path to understanding and engaging an audience is within reach through thoughtful surveys. INN’s innovative audience resources, including our new audience survey template, were designed to foster meaningful connections between newsrooms and their audiences, encourage curiosity and enhance service.
INN members can reach out to INN’s audience team to find out more about how we can help you get the most out of your annual survey.
