The Results Are In! Slaw’s Inaugural Reader Survey

As some of you may recall from earlier in the year, we ran our first-ever Slaw reader survey. While it has taken us some time to aggregate and digest all of the submissions, we are pleased to finally release our inaugural Slaw Readers Survey Report.

At the outset of this process, our goals were pretty simple: to better understand our readership, and to lay the groundwork for future planning. And I must say, it was very exciting to watch all those submissions roll in! So many of you took the time to respond, giving us demographics, your likes and dislikes, and suggestions for how to make Slaw a stronger resource.

After an initial spike of returns, we decided to continue collecting surveys right up until the end of February. We used the spring and summer months to go over the responses, pulling statistics and categorizing what readers like about Slaw, and what they’d change. It was fascinating to see what themes emerged. We also incorporated some statistics from our website analytics — did you know we had over 2 million visits last year?

If there’s one big lesson I came away from this process, it’s this: Slaw is a community of very loyal readers and contributors. Yes, we’re Canadian; but our audience draws in from the United States, UK, Australia and most common law countries you can think of. Our reach is more global than I expected, and once people start reading Slaw, they come back! Everyone from our bloggers and columnists, to our regular readers and commenters should be very proud of that!

Now, at last, we’re ready to share the results with you. You’re welcome to peruse the sampling of slides I’ve included in this post, below. Or, you can surf on over to our survey results page for the complete picture. The full set of slides are also available as a downloadable PDF [6.6 MB].

I offer my sincere thanks to everyone who participates in Slaw in some way. This is a great community to be a part of!

Be sure to check out the survey results page (or grab a PDF version) for much more!