It's that time of year again.
Every year I take time to create a survey for all of my blog readers so I can find out what is working and not working on the blog. You can take the survey by going here.
I think this is an enourmously important part of any process so I wanted to offer some incentives to my readers. I will randomly choose one of the responders to win a free ticket to the next Solving for X workshop. So let me know how I'm doing and I'll be in touch soon!
Excelsior!
Keep up the good work!
Below are the results from my "How am I doing?" survey and it seems that those of you who took the survey are pretty satisfied with the blog. I have gotten some requests to do more posts on marketing and I will be sure to do more of those in the future. Also everyone said that they would recommend the blog to others, so please do! I would love to have more comments and more readers! Thanks for being so supportive so far and I promise to continue to improve the blog. The main bullet points of the results are below. Enjoy.
Excelsior!
1. Most of my readers are female and between the age of 26-35, the second highest category is Males 51-90
2. 50% of my readers read the blog everyday and 37% read it every few days
3. 60% heard about the blog from me. Guess I'm pretty good at self promotion!
4. 50% have been helped by the blog more than three times
5. 40% want more marketing blog posts
6. 100% would recommend the blog to their friends!
Thanks to all the respondents!
Thanks to everyone who filled out the survey on your thoughts about the blog. If you didn't get a chance yet, you can still do that here.
If you haven't ever asked your customers to give you feedback, it's like trying to catch fish with your are hands. A survey serves you like a fishing net. It has a specific range and it allows you to capture a large amount of data, that you can then use to make your project better. That being said I am casting another net and if you are reading this blog and you are an actor, producer, or own a theatre company, I would love for you to participate. The stats that have come back so far on this have been fascinating and I'm already developing a lot of ideas based off of the information that's coming in.
Below is the letter about a new venture of mine that I am developing. Feel free to take the actor or Theatre Company/Producer survey. Would love to include the blog readers in this development step.
Tomorrow I'll have the results of my survey, and in a few weeks, I'll have the results of this one below. If you haven't done it yet, cast that net.
Your business will thank you.
Excelsior!
Dear friends in the arts,
Small Pond Entertainment has been
heavily involved in the NYC Theatre Community for a number of years and
has often made specific casting suggestions for projects. As a result,
we have decided to explore the world of casting in the Indie Theatre
community and are currently working towards gaining a better
understanding of the needs of our colleagues. Below you will find links
to two surveys. One for actors and one for theatre companies/ Producers. We ask
that you take a few moments to tell us what kind of casting company
would be most helpful for you through answering these simple survey
questions. We will collect all the data at the end of this month (July 31st)
and those who complete the survey will be the first to hear about the
new services we create. Look forward to hearing your thoughts and
thanks in advance for filling out the survey!
Sincerely,
The Small Pond Casting Team.
Theatre Company/ Producer survey
So it's been over a year since I last did a survey of my readers and it looks like now I have a few more, so I thought it would be fun to check in with everyone and see what you think of the ol' blog. I will look carefully at the survey and use it as a way of shaping future blogs, so it'd be great if you took a second to fill it out.
You can do that here.
Look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts.
Excelsior!
You better be ready to get answers like the one below. For the most part the responses I've gotten to this survey have been positive, but I just received a response that was not. So before I answer this posting, I just want to say that this reminded me of a very important fact in producing:
You're never going to please everyone. Somebody will not like the way you do things or your show for that matter. And if you invite people to give criticism, you need to be able to take it. And take it I did.
So here's my response, to this young man 26-35 who reads my blog once a week, has never been helped by it, and will not recommend it to his friends. Let's read what he has to say shall we?
"You promised daily updates in your blog, and haven't maintained your promise. Also, you sound like you're a new, moonlighting (albeit successful) producer, who needed to put his own money in to his project because he was unable to raise the money, but you write with a pedagogical tone and almost no humility. It's off-putting. It's not that we're not interested to hear from a newish producer's perspective, but we don't want you to talk like a seasoned vet - we don't trust you. Tell us about the day-to-day, lessons learned, not just theorized, the facts. You're a great resource for facts."
"You promised daily updates in your blog, and haven't maintained your promise."- Sir, you are right on the money with that one. Truth of the matter is some days I get these things called coverages, which means that I have to watch someone else's class in addition to the five I teach a day. I usually write this blog during my off periods, so when I have less of those off periods, sometimes I don't get to write every day. This is something I'll work on.
"Also, you sound like you're a new, moonlighting (albeit successful) producer, who needed to put his own money in to his project because he was unable to raise the money, but you write with a pedagogical tone and almost no humility."----Yep. Brand new as a matter of fact. ROOMS is my first commercial production and when you're starting out, sometimes you gotta pay to play. As for the pedagogical tone, well I am a teacher so I guess that's how I write. I'm not sure I agree with the humility side of things though. I'm pretty sure I don't claim to have all the answers and have mentioned on this blog the number of mistakes I've made and money I've lost, but maybe that wasn't the post you read that week. Again, sorry if I come across as having no humility or being pedantic. I certainly don't do it intentionally.
"It's off-putting. It's not that we're not interested to hear from a newish producer's perspective, but we don't want you to talk like a seasoned vet - we don't trust you."- Thanks for this. I was unaware that my tone was that of a seasoned vet. I will say that in the Indie Theatre community, I've been producing for 7 years now, so perhaps that could inform some of this "seasoned vet" feeling. Sorry you don't trust me, but who's the "we" you're referring to?
"Tell us about the day-to-day, lessons learned, not just theorized, the facts. You're a great resource for facts."-----Hmmm. Ok Day to day I feel like I already do pretty well, except for those days I skip, go here for a quick run down of lessons learned, and the facts? The facts are that this is a tough business, and there are plenty of folks out there making thier way as producers. I'm here to help, and so far folks seem to be happy with the help I give. I'm sorry you're unhappy, but I appreciate your candor. It lets me know what I need to work on. I hope that when you read this post next week, you'll have some more thoughts to share. As we all know there can be no progress if there's no resistance, so in the words of one of my favorite shows, Rain on.
Excelsior!
So after about a day, a whopping 8 people have taken the survey about the blog. This has yielded some interesting results which I'll share with you all. Click here if you haven't taken the survey yet, and since one reader asked how I do these surveys, I'll answer that as well.
If you want to make your own survey, go to SurveyMonkey and they have a great system that helps you create your own surveys.
On to the results thus far. Keep in mind this is with a very small group of respondents:
62.5% of my readers are between 18 and 25 years old
25% of my readers are between 26 and 35 years old
12.5% of my readers are between 36 and 50 years old
So most of my readers are younger than me. This is interesting. Not sure what I'll do with this info yet.
50% read my blog everyday
50% read my blog every few days
Incidentally, my readership is split 50/50 male female.
50% heard about this blog from The Blog Writer. I just googled this and didn't find anything, so help me out here guys :)
12.5% are helped by this blog everyday
37.5% are helped by this blog more than three times
12.5% have never been helped by this blog
I need to get the first percentage up a bit.
There are more, but I'll wait until some more answers come in. A ton of people though are interested in learning more about raising money and networking.
Looks like I have a mission.
Stay tuned.
Excelsior!
So this weekend somebody unsubscribed from this blog. Now most people would probably say, "oh well" and go about their business, but those of you that know me, know that I am incredibly reflective and that I value customer service highly. So, I have created a survey for my readers. You can click here to take the survey. As an incentive, I will choose one respondent to win free tickets to an upcoming Small Pond show and a bag of Cadbury mini-eggs (those are my favorite) So respond away. Let me know how I'm doing!
Excelsior!
