Companies seem to love surveys. They’re efficient! They will give us valuable insights!
But here is another angle. Surveys are often flawed and have a real lack of diversity issues.
In When it comes to audience diversity, newsrooms are asking the wrong questions, NiemanLab says:
News organizations often miss what their audiences actually care about because they rely too often on a flawed approach to surveying and ask the wrong questions.
and
By far the most effective way to field a survey is by email. Richer, older, white audiences have a preference for email newsletters and are likely to dominate news organization’s largest email lists. They also have more time to take surveys. This is made more pronounced by the industry practice of scrubbing newsletters’ lists of anyone who doesn’t act like the most devoted readers with high open or click-through rates.
Surveys seem like an easy solution to gather lots of useful community data, however there are real complexities and questions we should raise around their effectiveness. Often the people we really want to reach don’t have capacity for them.
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