Wallyhood Survey Results

First, I want to thank everyone who took the time to give feedback on Wallyhood. The fact that almost 250 were willing to take a moment out of their day to help us understand our readers and make this blog better testifies to the fact that y’all care!

Not surprisingly, most readers live in Wallingford. It’s a Wallingford blog, after all. What may be a bit surprising, though, is that almost half live between 40th and 50th Streets:

We’re not quite sure why that geographic area would dominate, except that most of the postering we’ve ever done has been in that area, and it does look like many of our readers found us through the posters we put on telephone poles and the cards we left in coffeeshops:

From this we learn a) we should spend more time reaching people where they live: the streets of the ‘hood, and b) Twitter ain’t all that.

As for age group, it’s a nice even split across the whole spectrum:

This next finding was heartening to us: at least for the people willing to answer a poll, they’re almost all very regular readers. When asked “How often do you read Wallyhood”, almost everyone responded that they were reading it either every day or every other day:

And why are they reading Wallyhood? Well, we’d hoped for some clear-cut answers, with some factors leaping out ahead of the others, but it just didn’t come out that way:

We neglected to include an option about schools, which is too bad, because, while the majority of our readers don’t have kids at home, many do:

We were also interested to learn more about how people read Wallyhood:

We had no idea what “Other” could be until we ran into our friend Hernan at a party last week, and he mentioned that he sees Wallyhood exclusively through his Facebook feed (if you’re not already a fan of Wallyhood on Facebook, become one now!) If there’s another means we’re missing, please let us know.

Just about 50% of respondents said they’d be interested in a meet-up of Wallyhood readers, with about half of those interested in meeting at a bar and half interested in meeting at a park or child-friendly restaurant, so we’ll start thinking about a good time for that in the coming months.

Finally, the comments were eye-opening and helpful (even, or perhaps especially, the negative ones). We’ve already posted some of these, but here are a few more that jumped out as being generally interesting, with responses:

• “I would like to see enhanced coverage of community events, especially for nonprofit organizations.  The Wallingford homes tour last autumn received very little coverage and there are no announcements about events and concerts at Good Shepherd Center.  Please enhance these announcements in a timely manner.”

This was a common theme: many people would like to hear more about community events. We report what we know, but the truth is that many community groups are just not that good at PR. Often we’ll get a flier sent to us a few days before an event, with little more than a time and place. We write what we can, but we beseech those involved to share information with us that will help us tell a story about the event. And if you’re involved in an organization that is holding an event, let us know! 90% of the information we report originates with someone sending us an e-mail letting us know something is going on.

• “I’d be interested to see more investigative micro-reporting, not just announcements of Chamber of Commerce awards and that sort of thing. Some of the work with the north precinct bureau was excellent, for example.” and “Keep the quirky! If I want impersonal I’ll go to [another local news source]’s site”

We’d love to do more of this. It takes time, of course, but honestly, the more in-depth, thoughtful and fun pieces are why we started the blog in the first place, not just to serve as a announcement board for bake sales and 20% specials. As our life has gotten busier, these have tailed off a bit, but we’ve got a New Year’s Resolution to focus more on this direction.

• “I’m reading it on the toilet via iPhone so short and to the point is key. :)”

Oops, I guess this post qualifies as “long”. Sorry!