Survey Results: How did you hear about us?

Here we have the results and analysis of our first community survey (and an infographic for those who like that kind of thing).

A big thank you to everyone who participated in our recent social media survey. This really helped answer some questions that we had in order to be able to make sure we were reaching as much of the community as possible. We were honestly surprised at some of the results and we will definitely be taking lots of it on board.

First of all here is an infographic @Daeraxa put together on the data that was provided.

And now onto the analysis.

How did you hear about us?

The first question on the survey was "How did you hear about us"? The idea with this one was to see where people had heard about Pulsar from to see if this aligned with some of our earlier efforts to publicise the project.

By far the biggest result here was simply people searching the web for an Atom replacement, I don't think there were any shockers here as this is how many of us got involved in the first place.

A slightly more surprising result was the number of people who found out via Reddit, mostly /r/atom but also from a number of programming or other related subreddits.

We also had a lot of people come from seeing a YouTube video on the project and it seems a considerable number of those were from the DistroTube channel (which we mentioned in a previous blog). It really goes a long way to show the effect that community content creators in this space can have on a project and its popularity.

We had a couple of other interesting results here such as word of mouth from colleagues, various web articles, alternative software sites and even the Atom Wikipedia page.

Which community area do you check for updates?

This was a very interesting question and one we thought especially important to make sure we were placing the right amount of focus on our various community areas. The last thing we want is for anyone to be left out of important news and updates because of choosing one community area over another.

What took us a little by surprise was just how many people do actually check the website - 66% of people check the website in one form or another, either by itself or along with other media channels. It is clear that we need to make sure that we put a lot of effort into this to make sure this is as good as it can be.

I think there was no surprise to see a large number of people check the Discord server, this is after all the area in which most of our active community members tend to hang out so if you want to pop in and say hi then this would be the place to do so.

What took us aback slightly was just how popular the /r/pulsaredit subreddit, GitHub Discussions forum and Mastodon account are. I think we expected to see these a little lower on the popularity but instead it is clear that we need to invest a little more time and effort into these platforms to make them feel equal.

Other comments on social media presence

This was deliberately a very freeform question and was really designed as a way for people to say what they wanted on the topic of our social media. We had a bunch of really lovely messages from people thanking us and giving us encouragement so thank you so much for those comments.

Some comments we will definitely be taking to heart are the ones about improving our presence on some of our other channels (i.e. Mastodon, GitHub Discussions, /r/pulsaredit subreddit) as well as making announcements, releases and new blog posts more immediately obvious on our website.

Summary

We also had a bunch of comments about Pulsar itself and around its development, whilst we are listening and will take those comments on board, we won't be focusing on them in this post - that is info we will likely ask in a future poll. And on the topic of future polls it is clear that this was a really rather successful experiment, we got a good number of replies and feedback which will hopefully help us improve our community communication.

For anybody who wants to see the raw data (don't worry we went through everything to make sure there was definitely no identifiable data or anything unsavoury) then you can see it on our organization repo.

We will absolutely be using this format again as it seems to be a great way for people to give their feedback and comments, especially for those who may not use our busier social channels. So thank you again for all those who took part and look forward to the next one!