Reader Survey: What You Said

By IR Web Report Staff

TWO days ago, we asked you to tell us what you want from IR Web Report by completing a short reader survey.

Here, in brief, is what you told us:

Types of posts you prefer

We were wondering if the “Daily Digests” of news articles were worth the trouble. Each one of these posts is produced by sorting through around 1,500 daily items to find what we think are the five to 10 worthwhile reads for “IR website people.”

They’re a chore, quite frankly, but it is a good discipline for us do this type of daily media scan as it keeps us informed.

Anyway, we got our answer:

• 43% of respondents said they value the news digests the most;
• 43% said they most value original articles by IR Web Report staff; and,
• 14% chose “other” and commented that they like both types.

Frequency preferences

When we first started IR Web Report six years ago, we sent out email updates twice-monthly and sometimes only once in a month. Starting in August this year, we moved that schedule up to weekly for existing email subscribers and daily for new ones.

Here are the results for your frequency preferences:

• 4% said several times per day
• 39% said once per day
• 25% said several times per week
• 25% said once per week
• 7% said other with suggestions ranging from “hourly” to “every two weeks.”

This suggests we need to provide an option to subscribe to weekly email updates. We already offer a weekly RSS update option, so adding the weekly email update option is easy using Feedburner. Expect that option to be available in a few days. As for those who said “several times per week,” we’re not sure what to do about you. We need to give it some thought.

Topics you want us to cover

We got a lot of good suggestions and confirmation that we’re on the right track. That figures, otherwise you wouldn’t be subscribers!

We did notice that many of you are interested in trends, best practices, and new technologies for investor relations. That’s good because that’s really what interests us, too. Expect more in that vein in the near future.

What you think of us

In the last question, we asked you to rate IR Web Report for various qualities on a 6-point scale from “really bad” to “outstanding.” No one rated IR Web Report “really bad” for anything (thank you).

You gave us majority “very good” rating on six of the seven factors, including:

• Relevance;
• Expertise;
• Honesty;
• Timeliness;
• Reliability; and,
• Ease of Use.

Most people, however, said Site Design is our weakest attribute. A majority rated it only as “good.” And, yes, we have some (long overdue) improvements to make in the design department.

We are planning a “look and feel” upgrade next month, but please don’t hold your breath for anything fancy. We’re not designers or coders, but we do like doing the coding and design ourselves because we learn a lot doing it.

It also makes us more empathetic to coders and designers, and helps us have conversations with them where we actually know what they’re talking about.

Finally, a big thank you for taking the time to complete the survey. We’ve learned a lot from it, and will be making improvements to better serve your needs and interests.

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3. Why do you like email more than RSS?
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5. NIRI survey predicts 56% e-proxy adoption

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