THANK YOU for voting on issues near to my heart. No, not your vote on national issues in America's Nov. 7 general election. I mean your vote on issues of Special Events Magazine.
Our staff has been poring over the results of our 2000 Reader Satisfaction Survey. We asked a representative sample of our readers to compare us with other magazines in the industry and tell us what they like about Special Events Magazine and what could stand some improvement.
We love hearing the good stuff (89 percent of you think the magazine is "excellent," "very good" or "good"; only 6 percent called it "fair," and no respondent labeled it "poor").
We are also studying what you think we could do better: more on food and menus, more expert opinion, more on smaller events as well as the big-budget blockbusters, more on what goes wrong as well as what goes right. (Although I'm still not sure how to reconcile the comment "more on tents!" with "why so much on tents?")
The survey also told us a lot about you. Our readers are leaders (more than a third in the survey listed their titles as owner or president). You invest time - an average of three hours a week - reading industry news and information.
Just as powerful a source of information for our readers as the printed page is the Internet. More than three-fourths of our respondents had visited supplier/vendor sites online within the previous month, and two-thirds had visited industry news or information sites as well. On average, our respondents spend three hours per week accessing the Internet for work-related reasons. This is exciting for us because our company has made a tremendous commitment to moving our print content from all our magazines to the World Wide Web.
Our survey results also include every single comment written in by respondents. Three words came up a number of times in answer to the query "What do you like most about Special Events Magazine?" The three: "ideas," "inspiration" and "insight."
We will make those our watchwords.
