Click to view sampleLast month, several readers participated in a survey on the weekly Croquet Network eNewsletter (now closed). I am pleased to report that all respondents rated the newsletter as good (58%) or excellent (42%). Granted, the survey obviously would have been most likely to find current subscribers ... and well, readers that don't like the newsletter would have unsubscribed long ago, so you can assume the favorable rating is a bit skewed. However, I'm going to run with that stat for now.

A great concern I had is how much filtering needs to be done on news items. Slowly, more and more croquet sites are joining the connected world and offering both news items and RSS feeds. Those feeds drive the eNewsletter (and drive exposure for your club and events). I often wonder if there are too many links each week. The readers said the amount of items per week was acceptable by a count of 83% to 17%. 

And based on the popularity of the "Featured Items" section in the survey, I can surmise that people consider that as enough of filter. And hopefully, the geographical breakdown is helping them skim for the local items most important to them.

Featured Items ranked number two behind North American News as the top item. The majority of the readers are from North America, so that was no surprise. Following the top two -- we had video instruction (3), instruction (4) and video highlights (5) as the most popular items. This is almost exactly what I would have projected. The development of Croquet Network as a video entity continues on at crawl despite the relative ease of this type of production. Still, it's nice to see the feedback that supports the concept.

There were a lot of suggestions for growing the subscriber list. The most common was to contact croquet club managers. A program is under way now to identify club managers and market the newsletter to the clubs. The early conversion rate is 15%, but the sample is still small.

The final survey question asked for suggestions or comments. One respondent suggested a selective approach continuing to be active on the Nottingham List as a reminder that Croquet Network exists as a resource. I agree with that approach and hope that the Croquet Nation can see that Croquet Network endeavors to offer a public/open window into our sport while acting as a user-driven central repository for photos, video, articles and reports. 

And one respondent offered the following:

"I look forward to this every week. It is responsible for my introduction into worldwide croquet."

Takeaways for the Croquet Nation 

• Clubs and associations need to generate news and they need to offer RSS feeds. If you do this, you will appear on the Croquet Network news feed and the e-newsletter. And the best stuff gets pushed out via Twitter and Facebook. It's free exposure ... take advantage.
• Subscribe to the newsletter -- the best way to improve the newsletter is help it getting to the point of being advertiser-worthy. The world associations have at least 20,000 members. We need to be able to draw in as many of that 20k as we can for our major events.