Last Wednesday, we sent out our first-ever subscriber survey, asking the fantastic readers who make the Shawnee Mission Post possible what they like about the site, what parts of their community they want to see covered most, and what they want to see changed.
Today, we’re going to present a few of the highlights from the results — including what we heard you say about improvements we should make.
Satisfaction and interest in coverage types
- First, the response rate was somewhere in the vicinity of strong to quite strong. We had more than 430 subscribers participate. Suffice to say, that’s a good deal more than we were expecting. So, a deep tip of the cap to our subscribership at large for your willingness to share your thoughts!
- Second, overall satisfaction with the site was nothing to sneeze at. In fact, 95 percent of respondents reported being satisfied subscribers. About two-thirds of all respondents (65 percent) said they were “very satisfied” with their subscription to the Shawnee Mission Post. Another 30 percent said they were “somewhat satisfied.” Three percent of respondents said they were “neutral,” under 2 percent said they were “somewhat dissatisfied” and less than 1 percent said they were “very dissatisfied”.
- Third, 95 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with the value they got for the money they spent on their subscription. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they felt “like the subscription price is about fair for the value I get.” Twenty-six percent of respondents said they felt “that I get more value from my subscription than I pay for.” Five percent of respondents said they “feel like I’m paying more than I should for the value I get.”
- SHAMELESS PLUG: If YOU would like to join these throngs of satisfied people (we’ve got 2,017 subscribers total as of this morning), why not try a subscription yourself for just $.99 for the first month?
Readers also made clear that our coverage of city and county government as well as local elections and politics are among their top priorities. Here’s a look at the number of respondents who said they were “very interested” in our different coverage topics:
- Coverage of city and county government: 86 percent
- Coverage of local elections and politics: 81 percent
- Coverage of business openings and closings: 68 percent
- Coverage of the Shawnee Mission School District: 65 percent
- Coverage of real estate development and new projects: 54 percent
- Coverage of crime, fires and emergencies: 45 percent
What we need to improve
While overall satisfaction with the site and perceived value of the price of a subscription were very high, a few common themes emerged as we reviewed responses to our question about the one thing you would change about the site:
- A number of people don’t like getting two email newsletters each day, or are confused as to why there is so much overlap between the content in Out Front (the early morning newsletter) and the Daily Digest (the noon newsletter).The idea behind Out Front when we launched it about a year ago was that it would give a quick, easy-to-read summary of the biggest stories from the past 24 hours. We wanted to provide an option you could read on the way out the door in the morning and feel like you were caught up. The Daily Digest a list of the latest headlines we’ve published with a few lines from the opening paragraph of each story.Open rates for both newsletters are higher than 50 percent, so we know there are subsets of subscribers who are devotees of each. But we definitely don’t want to be filling people’s inboxes with messages they don’t want. To that end, we’re going to be looking at ways to improve newsletter subscription management for subscribers in the coming months.
In the meantime, however, if you’d prefer to receive only one newsletter or the other, you can stop receiving either the Daily Digest or Out Front by clicking the “unsubscribe from this list” link at the bottom of any message.
- Log in issues presented frustrations for several subscribers. A number of readers reported that they are asked to log in multiple times on the same device, or that a particular browser won’t remember them as a subscriber.This is not good.So we’ve reached out to the subscription management system provider to dig in to what may be causing these issues for some and see if we can tweak the code to make accessing the site more seamless. If you have problems staying logged in to the site as a subscriber, please let us know so we can flag the issue for the developer. The more cases we have to present, the easier it should be to get the issue fixed.
THANK YOU to everyone who has made truly local community news possible in Shawnee Mission with their subscriptions! Onward!
