Our Recent Pond Tips Survey Results

Last week I sent out an online survey concerning several questions about our pond tips and my thanks go out to the hundreds of you who took time to answer the questions. It’s important to me to provide you with useful and helpful information but not to take up too much of your time in doing so.

The results of the survey show that, for the most part, we are on a good track that most people like. There are a few areas where we can improve and we’ll certainly try to do that!

As promised, I did want to share the results with you and also announce the winner of the $25 gift card from Amazon.com. And by the way, some folks asked about why we would give away an Amazon gift card and not provide a gift card from our pond shop. It’s a valid question to be sure, but to me, with the holidays approaching, it made more sense to give you something you can use immediately. Pick up a new book you’ve been wanting to read, or grab a gift for the grand kids if you’d like…you can use it for anything that you might want. So that’s that as they say.

Now on to the survey results.

Our first question concerned the frequency of the pond tips that we send out. 37% indicated weekly tips were best, while 35% felt that bi-weekly tips were fine. Other less desired options were once a month or less than once a month. In general, we have tried to provide weekly tips during the summer months and normally this works out fine. However there have been times when we get really busy and fall behind, and so it’s not uncommon to see tips come out every 10 days or more, so it seems we’re kind of in the ball park here.

We also asked how long the videos should be and the response for this was pretty clear. 65% of responders indicated that 2 to 5 minutes was just fine, with the next greatest number (19%) felt that 5 to 7 minutes would be good. Again, we’re very close to this, but we’ll continue to try to keep the tips useful AND concise.

In terms of how people wanted the tips presented, nearly 78% felt that video was best, but 54% also liked the text or article option too. Only 14% liked the idea of audio presentations. So for the most part, we’ll be including a video with a short article attached to it that summarizes the topic of the week.

I’ve been wanting to do some online pond webinars of late, and fortunately 78% of you agreed that these would be interesting. So look for some no-cost webinars to become available in the coming months. I’ll likely spend part of our “off-season” on some of the more important topics to pond owners.

And finally, we asked if our readers would want to receive updates via Facebook, which is a social website that Ive found myself using more and more for keeping updated with various things. 31% of respondents said yes, while 69% indicated that no, they wouldn’t use this service. So, with 1/3 of our readers using Facebook for this purpose, we’ll likely provide a few more updates there, however the mainstay of our pond tips will continue to be on this blog.

In terms of content, we asked about other topics that you might like to see discussed in more detail and we again received hundreds of replies to this. Many are quite varied and a bit much to post here, but let me just say that we’ll continue to review these comments and look to incorporate many of them in upcoming pond tips!

And finally, congratulations go out to Marjorie Laube for winning the $25 gift card from Amazon! My thanks go out to Marjorie and to all of you who participated and helped to make our pond tips better than ever!