WiserEarth Community Survey Results - May/June 2009

Research carried out by: Camilla, Angus and Honore

I Research Objectives & Methodology

Objectives:

The objectives of this research were fourfold:

1. Gather feedback as to how the WiserEarth website is currently doing in terms of delivering to our users/members what they need?

2. Find out what are our current users specific networking needs?

3. Find out what social media/networks members currently use?

4. Find out what type of information our users most want to get from WiserEarth?

Once we have gathered all of the feedback from our research, we hope to use it to specifically help us to:

A. Find out whether our users are more interested in growing their network/mapping their network or accessing timely information through the site.

B. Be able to answer some of our design questions based on Joshua Porter's lastest book, Designing for the social web, which we have been using to help us make improvements to the WiserEarth site

Our Online Survey Methodology:

A random sample of 400 respondents who are registered users on the site as well as members of the WiserEarth editors groups were invited to take an online survey. 22% of the people who were asked actually took the survey. Out of the 89 respondents who took the survey, 85 respondents completed the entire survey.

The sample of respondents is bias towards those living in English speaking countries and specifically towards those living in the United States, with 61% of respondents living in the US.

The majority of respondents (75%) can be described as nonprofit/social cause professionals (NGO/nonprofit professionals, consultants, activists, networkers).

Telephone Survey Methodology:

Additional interviews were conducted on the telephone among a number of WiserEarth user and non-users to help further enhance our community research. This research was also conducted in May and June 2009 and supports many of the conclusions drawn from these survey results.

Community feedback for improving usability of WiserEarth gathered via WiserEarth's 'Suggestions Group' is also been used to help prioritize improvements to the site.

Research Results

• Overall the website is doing well in terms of enabling people to achieve what they have wanted to do or find what they are looking for. 81% of our respondents said 'yes' when they were asked this question. However, we should be looking to push this bar much higher, say nearer to 95%.

The 'No' answers clearly point to ongoing issues around usability across a number of different areas of the site which are undermining the overall user experience. We need to address these issues. Responses that suggested this include:

"For non native English speaker the most of the posts are complicated", "It is really hard to do efficient researches", "difficult to navigate", "still looking for a way to have a conversation in a group", "the (group) workspace is still less practical than email"

• In terms of people's reasons for joining WiserEarth in the first place, respondents joined the site for many different reasons. 'Connecting with others who share my values' (16%) and 'being part of an effort that focuses on helping the social justice and environmental community' (16%) were cited the most often. Finding out who is working on what and where (14%), as well as highlighting one's work were also commonly cited (14%).

Other responses included:

• When we asked about whether they had a preference for growing and sharing their network over getting access to timely information 52% of users did not claim a preference for one over the other. However, among those respondents who did make a choice, twice the number of people cited growing their network over getting access to timely information (32% versus 14%) as being more important to them. This indicates that, all things being equal, networking enhancements should take some priority over information enhancements.

• When asked specifically about their level of interest in using WiserEarth to build their network, almost 50% of respondents said that they are interested and are already using WiserEarth to build their networks. 40% said that they would use for networking WiserEarth if it was easier to do on the site.

• In relation to whether a network map is important, the majority of respondents either said that the network map was a nice to have or either not important to them (65%). One third of respondents felt that it was very important. Comments suggest that this existing network map feature is underused and that it doesn't currently serve any core need. If it were to be developed users fear that if there were many nodes, it would impossible to use. This would suggest that a network map is not currently a critical feature for users.

• Resources were seen as either extremely important or very important by the majority of people (74%). Events information (56%) was cited as either extremely important or very important by more than half of the respondents. Only 28% of respondents cited jobs as either extremely important or very important. This would suggest that jobs are the least required feature on the site. We assume that users are using other sites such as Idealist for their job posting needs.

• When asked from where people like to receive information, respondents overwhelmingly prefer to get information from friends. This indicates that we should review, and where possible, improve the way that information is shared among friends on and off the site.

• The majority of respondents said that they use FaceBook (mentioned 37 times) to share their social justice/environmental-related information. Email was close behind (mentioned 33 times). Listservs and WiserEarth were also mentioned frequently (26 and 24 times respectively). LinkedIn, blogs and their own website were also cited a number of respondents. The research indicates that FaceBook is the main website that respondents use for sharing social justice/environmental-related information. Creating ways for FaceBook users to register (FaceBook Connect), share the work people are doing on FB and vice versa, what people are doing on the WiserEarth site is important.

•  When asked about their preferred sites for sharing environmental and social justice information, the majority of respondents cited the use of FaceBook. Some said that this is "only because that's where my largest network lies". Clearly the fact that many people are on the site makes a big difference to whether a network is used or not. Twitter also gets mentioned due to its ease of use and speed.

Next steps from this research:

Thank you to everyone that joined in the survey. We are aware that we still have got quite a lot of work to do especially to address the usability issues that people keep coming up against. Our technical team is a bit smaller right now as we lost a couple of programmers earlier in the year, however, over the coming months, we are determined to address the following areas:

- improve the search tools (this will involve changing to a different search software system as the current open source software we've been using has presented us with a number of limitations).

- making it easier for people to register on the site

- making it easier for people to find groups/events near where they are located

Latest update

We have just implemented some initial designs based on this research. We invite you to share your thoughts prior to 8th September. Find out more.