What You Said: mnartists.org 2004 member survey
Results of the 2004 member survey are in, and you can read them here! This fall, mnartists.org undertook its second on-line member survey. Thanks to all of you: we received over 650 responses. A summary follows, with a link to the survey itself.
Methodology
The member survey was an internet/web based only survey. We e-mailed the survey to over 5,000 mnartists.org members and also posted the survey on the site for one month. When reviewing the results of the survey it is important to keep in mind that the results are not representative of all mnartists.org members or mnartists.org users. A certain amount of bias can be expected—all the respondents were self-selecting, and we only reached respondents who are part of mnartists.org email list, or who logged onto the site between September 15 and October 15, 2004 and clicked onto the survey from the home page.
About Your Membership
The respondents to our survey reflect the diversity of artists on the site. Over 50% of respondents place themselves in the Visual Arts category. The remaining percentage of respondents split almost equally between the other categories of artists including design & architecture, literary arts, media arts, performing arts, and arts organization. An overwhelming percentage of respondents have been part of the mnartists.org community for 1 year or more, with over 35% members for 2 or more years!
Over 70% of respondents show their work on the web and almost 45% of respondents show their work on mnartists.org as their primary web presence. Although the majority of respondents said they visit mnartists.org infrequently (about every 3 months) 30% of respondents told us they visit the site at least once a month. The majority of respondents are using the site between 10 – 15 minutes and an overwhelming majority of respondents told us they are able to find what they want on the site most of the time. Overall, over 70% of respondents said they were somewhat or very satisfied with their visits to mnartists.org.
When asked how often members used the current features on mnartists.org the majority of respondents ranked their own home page as “used often”. The articles and news features had a high percentage of users ranking these features as being “used often”. The post card feature and the forums feature were ranked lowest as never use or not aware of.
Site Usage and Site Features
When asked how desirable respondents would find suggested services and features to be added to mnartists.org the overwhelming majority (70%) said an arts events calendar would be very desirable. Over 55% of respondents said that links to resources (marketing/sales, education, opportunities, etc.) would be very desirable.
Features that ranked high as being neither desirable nor undesirable (in the middle) were blogging, an mnartists.org product line, and print on demand. In the comments report several respondents said they were unfamiliar with or had never heard of blogging or print on demand. Streaming media, video, music ranked fairly high at desirable or very desirable by over 40% of respondents. None of the features suggested rated as very undesirable by a significant percentage of respondents.
When asked directly if respondents would sign up for a monthly email newsletter from mnartists.org the overwhelming majority said they definitely or probably would.
When asked directly if respondents would be likely to volunteer to promote mnartists.org in their artistic circles and/or communities an overwhelming percentage said they were unsure and would need more information. A good percentage said they definitely or probably would.
Future Direction
We found out that members overwhelmingly value mnartists.org because we provide artists exposure, promotion, networking, information, opportunities, community and hey—it’s FREE! We will use the information from this survey to inform us on site development, marketing, programming, community outreach, and in a host of other ways. Your suggestions, input, and ideas are valuable to us. We will be working to implement many of these in the next year and beyond. We can’t do everything, but we think you’ll be pleased with the future direction of mnartists.org. Thank you again for your response and support of mnartists.org. We couldn’t do it without you!
Sincerely,
mnartists.org staff
To see the pdf of survey results, click on “Related Content” button to the right of this column.