And the survey says ...

Apparently, we care a lot more about our blog than you do. Go figure.

On June 12, when we were celebrating our one-year anniversary of our move to Portugal and the start of this blog, we decided to do a reader survey.

We were ambitious. At the time, we’d just added our 400th subscriber and we read online that a “good” survey response rate would be 25%. We figured you, our dear readers, were better than “good” so we aimed for 150 responses.

When we closed the survey on July 7, we had responses from 71 of you wonderful people.

Now, we made this hard for you. This was no 4-question multiple-choice affair. Nosiree, we asked open-ended questions. Many of them, in fact. Digging deeply, it seems as though a handful of you clicked on the link to open the survey and did not complete the survey. That makes sense. It wasn’t easy. You have better things to do with your time.

This is the first piece of evidence that ties into a major theme of our results which is: we care a lot more about our blog than you do.

And this is as it should be. The blog consumes a significant portion of our mental bandwidth and we spend a fair amount of time working on posts - writing, finding images, editing, talking about topics, thinking about what we want to convey. It matters to us. A lot.¹

This is not to say it doesn’t matter to you. Many of you wrote wonderful messages about how helpful we have been and how you enjoy reading our posts. We have been thrilled with the feedback we’ve gotten. Clearly, many of you care about what we are producing.

But as one of Scott’s former bosses was fond of saying, we are not the stars of your show.

And nor should we be.

We have more evidence to support her claim. Nearly half (44%) of the 71 respondents reported reading 76-100 of our posts. In other words, pretty much everything we’ve written. These, then, are the people who’ve either been with us since the beginning or who went back and read through the archives. We figure these must be our most dedicated core readers.

One of the more simple questions we asked on the survey was: How often do we publish posts?

There’s a reason we asked that question. It’s been on our minds. A lot. Since we got here, we’ve made it a priority to publish twice a week. Every Monday and Thursday we’ve put something out there.² There have been times we’ve bent over backwards to stick to that schedule. Times when we put something out because it was Thursday and not because we were thrilled with what we’d written. Times when we’ve been casting about for topics but Darnit It’s Monday and Something Must Go Out.

So we asked you How often do we publish posts? And less than 20% of our most dedicated readers answered that question accurately. More people thought we publish weekly (27) or just plain didn’t know (19)³ than said twice a week (13). A little back of the envelope calculating: 71 respondents from ~400 readers is 18%. 13 of the 71 respondents know we publish twice a week; that’s also 18%. That means less than 3% of you even register the detail we have been holding up as a primary directive for ourselves.

And that’s an important message for us to hear. Because it frees us.

If y’all don’t notice what we’re busting our butts to do, it’s clearly not super important for us to bust our butts to do it.

Here’s a little follow up question that we’d love for you all to answer honestly, please:

Yep. On June 26, we decided the survey results gave us permission to cut back to once a week for a little while and see how that felt, so we did. And the answer is … we’re not sure yet.

We’ve enjoyed not having any pressure to put something out just to keep an arbitrary schedule.⁴ We’re also realizing that having some structure around our work on this blog is helpful so we’re unlikely to adopt a “publish whenever the mood strikes” approach.

Right now, we’re awash in ideas. We’ve got enough completed or nearly-ready-to-go drafts in the can to get us almost through the summer on a once-a-week schedule. That seems a bit excessive. Something that’s ready now may not be relevant in a month. So we’ll probably hit the publish button again later this week.

And maybe down the road the well will run dry (again). In which case, we might cut back. We’ll see.

Other interesting findings from the survey came in the answers to the (open-ended) questions What post(s) do you remember enjoying? and What post(s) do you remember not enjoying?

It’s clear that we’ve gone well past the days of being read primarily by friends and family. While 40 (56%) of the respondents identified as being friend/family, that means 44% of our most dedicated readers are not. And when asked what you remember enjoying and not enjoying, the responses illustrated how those audiences might find value in different topics.

For every person who reported not enjoying our posts about something like how to change your address with the Portuguese department of motor vehicles, someone else said they found that post helpful.

Some people found our posts about Eurovision to be interesting.

Others skipped them entirely.

Some people shouted More Josie!! in the comments at the end.

For the Josie fans: she just got a new floofie. It’s in the sun.

Others don’t care about having a pet in Portugal.

Our takeaway?

We can’t please all the people all the time. So we’re going to continue to write about whatever we find interesting and trust you to stick with us through the topics that don’t resonate with you.⁵

One final tidbit from the survey. Apparently, as many as 25% of you don’t read footnotes. Hmm.⁶

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Scott & Amy

1. Many is the conversation that is interrupted with one of us blurting “blog” and racing to the computer to get the ideas down before they leave our increasingly unreliable brains forever.

2. There was a week early on where we forgot to hit the button on a Thursday and a post went out on Friday.

3. More than one of you asked if that was a trick question :-D.

4. And we’re getting a touch long in the tooth for gymnastics.

5. That said, we tend to lose a few subscribers when we get in the weeds about things like transferring utilities. Can’t imagine why; it’s riveting stuff!

6. You’re missing out. Some of our best material is down here. It’s the the bits and pieces that are too good to remove entirely but disrupt the flow of the narrative so we tuck ‘em away.