Overview:

This offers practical guidance for creating thoughtful, impactful audience surveys that yield actionable insights rather than cluttered data. It emphasizes starting with a clear research goal, being intentional about who you survey, and deciding on key data points before drafting questions.

Audience surveys are one of the most effective tools publishers have for understanding their readers – and one of the easiest to get wrong.

When they’re done well, surveys give you something analytics can’t: direct insight into what your audience is trying to do, what’s getting in their way, and how your work fits into their lives. When they’re done poorly, they create noise, false confidence, or a spreadsheet full of data no one quite knows how to use.

This post is about building intentional, useful audience surveys – the type that help you make better decisions, not just collect more information. It’s grounded in best practices we’ve seen work across newsrooms of all sizes, and shaped by years of helping publishers turn audience input into clearer strategy, stronger products, and more sustainable revenue.

If you’re going to ask your audience for their time and attention, it’s worth doing it thoughtfully.

Why do audience research at all?

At the end of the day – whether your business model is ad-based, reader revenue – driven, or some blended Frankenstein, you succeed or fail based on how well you understand and serve your audience.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of us don’t know our audiences as well as we think we do.

Analytics can tell you what people do. Surveys help you understand why.

Audience research lets you ask questions like:

  • What are readers actually trying to achieve?
  • Where are they frustrated?
  • How does your journalism fit into their lives?
  • What was their experience with a specific moment, product, or decision?

Surveys give you direct, unfiltered input – not inferred behavior, not averages, not assumptions. They let your audience talk back. That’s kind of the point.

Tip #1: Start with a research goal, not a list of questions

This is where most surveys go sideways.

A goal is not:

“I want to know the age breakdown of my audience.”

A goal is:

“I want to understand what makes my audience distinct, how they might be valuable to advertisers, and what kinds of messages resonate with them.”

The difference matters.

When you lead with what you plan to do with the data, your survey suddenly gets clearer, shorter, and more useful. Every question should earn its place by helping you make a decision.

If you can’t answer “What will we do differently if we learn this?”—cut the question.

Tip #2: Be intentional about who you’re surveying

Not every survey needs to go to everyone.

Ask yourself:

  • Are you surveying your full audience or a specific segment?
  • Subscribers only? Lapsed readers? Non-supporters?
  • How will you reach them…email, on-site, social?
  • If you’re trying to reach beyond your current audience, who can you partner with?

A survey sent to “everyone” often ends up serving no one particularly well.

Tip #3: Decide your data points before you write questions

Before you open SurveyMonkey or Google Forms and start typing:

  • Outline the specific data points you need
  • Map those back to your research goal
  • Make sure you have a plan to use them

Surveys shouldn’t be fishing expeditions. Curiosity is great. Unstructured curiosity leads to spreadsheets that haunt you forever.

Tip #4: Make research part of your ongoing process

Audience research works best when it’s habitual, not heroic.

For many publishers, that means running a small number of regular surveys, such as:

  • One focused on editorial direction
  • One focused on reader revenue or membership
  • One focused on advertising or sponsorship insights

You don’t need to ask everything at once. In fact, please don’t.

Tip #5: Write questions like a human, not a researcher

Good survey questions are:

  • Clear
  • Concise
  • Free of jargon
  • Grounded in reality

A few hard-earned rules:

  • Avoid hypotheticals (“If we launched X, would you…?”)
  • Ask about real behavior, not imagined future behavior
  • Don’t stack multiple ideas into one question
  • Avoid absolutes like “always,” “never,” or “everyone”

Instead of:

“If we launched a membership program, what benefits would you want?”

Try:

“What memberships or subscriptions are you currently part of, and what do you value about them?”

Reality beats speculation every time.

Tip #6: Keep it short—and vary answer formats

Completion rates drop fast as surveys get longer. Ruthlessly prioritize.

A helpful gut check:

  • What will we learn?
  • What will we do with this information?

Also:

  • Mix up answer formats (multiple choice, checkboxes, scales)
  • Include “Other,” “None of the above,” or “Not sure”
  • Don’t force people into answers they don’t have

False precision helps no one.

Tip #7: Leave room for people to surprise you

Open-ended questions are messy. They don’t chart nicely. They take time to read.

They are also often where the most valuable insights live.

Include a few thoughtfully placed open-ended questions to:

  • Learn things you didn’t know to ask
  • Add nuance to quantitative results
  • Hear your audience in their own words

You don’t need many. You do need to actually read them.

Tip #8: Design the survey like a conversation

Order matters.

Your survey should:

  • Flow logically
  • Start easy, build complexity, end gently
  • Feel respectful of people’s time
  • Be accessible (language, device, ability, age)

And yes—double-check that every question connects back to your original goal. If it doesn’t, it’s probably just along for the ride.

What comes after the survey?

The survey isn’t the finish line — it’s the starting point.

Next steps often include:

  • Identifying trends across surveys, analytics, and KPIs
  • Filtering results by segment
  • Conducting follow-up user interviews

Pro tip: include a question that lets respondents volunteer for interviews. It makes the next phase much easier.

From there, you can move into:

  • Affinity mapping
  • Audience segments
  • Problem statements
  • “How might we…?” questions

That’s where insight turns into action. But that’s a topic for another post.

Helpful resources

If you want to go deeper, these are some resources that have guided us over the years:

Sample size calculator (SurveyMonkey):
https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/

Membership Puzzle – Audience Research Handbook:
https://membershipguide.org/handbook/getting-started-with-membership/conducting-audience-research

Krautreporter – Engaged Journalism Playbook:
https://krautreporter-public-production.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/public/Krautreporter’s+Engaged+Journalism+Playbook-d6c23.pdf

Membership Puzzle – Supporter Survey Question Bank:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12-F0n8CeshXPikI2jaXwaUBZ2wZFySEwhjX665ynu3M/edit

SurveyMonkey – Best Practices:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/survey-guidelines/

A great survey is like a great conversation:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/survey-is-a-conversation/

Harvard Program on Survey Research – Question Wording Tips:
https://psr.iq.harvard.edu/files/psr/files/PSRQuestionnaireTipSheet_0.pdf

What is audience understanding research (Sapio):
https://sapioresearch.com/tutorials/audience-understanding-research

5 best practices for designing surveys (Godfrey):
https://www.godfrey.com/insights/insight/5-best-practices-for-designing-surveys

JISC – Guide to Researching Audiences:
https://sca.jiscinvolve.org/wp/files/2009/12/sca_audanalysis_guidetoresearchingaudiences_v2-final.pdf

Lenfest Institute – 4-step guide to UX research for local news:
https://www.lenfestinstitute.org/lenfest-local-lab/part-1-explore-a-step-by-step-guide-to-using-ux-research-for-local-news-product-development/

About BlueLena

BlueLena is a strategy consulting and audience management platform founded in 2020 to support the sustainability of independent local media. By combining cutting-edge technology with expert-driven services, BlueLena helps over 250 news organizations across North America develop and manage subscription, membership, and donation models. Its unique shared-resource management approach provides publishers, regardless of size, with access to enterprise-level tools and personalized support, enabling them to focus on high-quality journalism while building loyal, revenue-generating audiences

BlueLena is majority employee-owned, and backed by investors including Automattic (the parent company of WordPress), the Local Media Association, and Old Town Media.