Readership survey highlights ThinkGeoEnergy’s important role for the geothermal community
Our 2019 Reader Survey revealed some rather interesting facts and provides some great feedback and guidance for our activities in the near and farther future.
Long overdue, I wanted to share with you the results of our 2019 Readership Survey. The participation of 300+ participants has given us a rather comprehensive and resourceful feedback.
So why did we do a survey? The motivation was to help us prepare for this year, guide us in our planning and help to understand what our readers want to find on ThinkGeoEnergy and how possibly they are willing to support us in our work. With some of the information from the survey being sensitive with regards to our strategy, we will not publish certain aspects and findings from the survey.
The survey open for about 10 days in December 2019 was split into different sections on our readership, content, planned podcasts and funding.
We shared the survey via an article on ThinkGeoEnergy, by email and widely on the social media channels used by us, namely LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
More than half of the survey respondents accessed the survey after reading our email campaign, about one fourth through the article on our website. 14% entered from a post on LinkedIn, and 10 % through a post on Facebook.
Based on the replies by the participants, English is by far the main working language by the readers of ThinkGeoEnergy.com, represented by around 70% of respondents, followed by German 6%, Spanish 5%, Turkish 3%, and French 2%. Other language represent around 15% of the total.
Describing in what segment of the geothermal industry people are working in, it shows a great diversity of people regularly reading the site.
Another great confirmation on the loyalty of our readership is shown in the frequency of visits.
For any news platform, it is crucial to understand how people access its content. The same applies to us and it was incredibly interesting to see how important our newsletter is for our website and garnering the readership we have today.
In the context of our content, we also asked what topics people find the most useful and want to find on our website.
Additional questions of the survey were aimed to guide us in our coverage from events. E.g. we asked generally on our event coverage and what people want us to report and what they want to see. Clearly, interviews on site, pictures from the event and a coverage via LinkedIn were seen as the most crucial.
We also wanted to learn more about our idea on launching a geothermal podcast and the feedback here was quite clear. People are rather interested in a new podcast on geothermal energy topics. Therefore we will push on this, despite lots of other things going on at the moment and will report soon on next steps.
Another incredibly humbling element of the survey were the personal responses on ThinkGeoEnergy, its role for the wider geothermal community and for the individual reader. Thank you so much for the kind feedback. Here a few statements that stuck out:
“ThinkGeoEnergy is the reference news outlet for anything related to geothermal energy, reported in a concise manner with information sources. Go read it!”
“A fantastic central repository for all news related to the geothermal industry.”
“Cannot think of a more comprehensive source of information than ThinkGeoEnergy – if it has happened or is going on, then it’s there! The weekly digest is my window on the geothermal world.”
“Content, technical – timely – wide ranging – objective- informed with opinion and advocacy. Weekly “MUST READ” on Geothermal from all sides.”
In the context of the upcoming World Geothermal Congress 2020 in Reykjavik, Iceland, we also asked what people want to see from ThinkGeoEnergy and here we also got a clear picture. People want to see our Geothermal Newspaper at the event, on-site interviews (video and podcast), our Best of Show Awards for the trade show element of the event. Another thing that people want to see is some ThinkGeoEnergy branded things … that is going to be a hard thing, but we will for sure try.
We further asked about some thoughts on ours on our business and funding of our activities. We have so far refrained from putting ThinkGeoEnergy behind a paywall and only offer it on a paid subscription basis. Not to fear, we are also not planning to change our model, yet are exploring how we can expand the opportunity to support us, or pay for additional valuable services or content. The survey responses clearly have helped formulate a few things on our side. More on that in the coming weeks.
We thank again all the respondents of the survey. With the ones that shared their email address with us, we also shared a global geothermal update of ours as a token of appreciation.