It’s no secret that Faunalytics loves data. But our love of data doesn’t simply stop with our original studies and library of research. We use data to inform and enhance virtually every aspect of what we do, and since we do our work with advocates at the forefront of our minds, it’s important for us to know what’s at the forefront of your mind.

For years now, we’ve been conducting an annual community survey of people who use our resources, ranging from veteran animal advocates to people who may have stumbled upon us just yesterday. It’s important for us to capture this range because, while we know that many users return to our site on a regular basis — monthly, weekly, or even daily — there is a sizeable portion of our audience who encounter our work anew every day, and who have to figure out how to navigate our resources without the benefit of previous experience.

You don’t have to tell us that you’re most likely “surveyed out.” We know how you feel! From customer service surveys appended to virtually every sales receipt, to endless pop-ups on websites, to surveys that sneak their way into your snail mail and email inboxes, companies everywhere are asking for your opinion. You may even feel numb to the purpose of completing surveys at all. How many times have you completed a questionnaire, only to feel like your responses simply end up on a spreadsheet somewhere, ignored by the company or product that supposedly values your opinion?

This is one of the ways that Faunalytics is different. Not only do we review all of your responses, they’re a cornerstone of a larger process we use to understand how our work is helping you to help animals. If you need convincing to take our community survey, read on as we make our case for a few minutes of your time.

1. We use your responses to guide changes to the structure and organization of our site.

In our 2018 survey, we discovered that a chunk of our audience found the way our site was organized to be lacking: we received comments that the site was difficult to navigate and that the way our content was organized wasn’t clear to everyone. In response, we redesigned and reorganized the site and, with heavy user-testing, implemented a series of changes throughout the latter half of 2018 and into 2019 that helped improve the flow navigation. This was reflected in the responses from 2019, which rated these aspects higher than the year before. In 2022, we paid special attention to responses related to site structure and organization, as we prepared to refresh our site design. In 2024, we launched our new website, and used that year’s community survey to make further refinements to navigation — reducing the number of clicks between you and the data you need.

2. We use your responses to help identify issues we don’t realize are issues.

Reading survey responses is always an education for us: we learn about issues with our work that we don’t even realize are there. For example, responses in 2022/2023 helped us identify issues with the search functionality on our site that we weren’t aware of before. More recently, users let us know that the way we credit our study summaries needed to be more clear. With your feedback, we’ve been able to make changes to the site that address problems like these. While they may seem minor, these little changes add up to a big difference in user experience, and that’s something we take very seriously. Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know, and you can help us become more self-aware.

3. We use your responses to know what types of resources you’d like to see more of.

Over the years, we’ve heard that our users have more desire for visual resources like videos and infographics. In response, we’ve increased the output of our highly visual Fundamentals series, and have been adding more graphs and visuals to our original studies, blog posts, and library summaries. Our 2021 survey revealed that there is demand among our audience for translated resources — since then, we’ve been adding dozens of translated studies and summaries to our library, which you can browse here, including dedicated microsites in Spanish and Simplified Chinese. Lately, our surveys have shown that you want more synthesis, to which we’ve responded by creating comprehensive overviews of different tactics, and data analysis projects that dive deeply into broad datasets and issues.

4. We use your responses to get to know you!

Though virtually every website out there uses some kind of analytics to understand its users, the data we gather via Google Analytics is relatively limited: it can tell us the general geographic location of our audience, the number of pageviews, and so on. However, it doesn’t tell us about your interests, your concerns, the research questions you have, and whether you understand our mission in the same way we do. Our survey tells us, for example, that while there’s a lot of overlap between who uses our site and who follows us on social media, a substantial number of people only know us from one channel or another. What’s more, through our open-ended questions, we’ve learned a lot of extra information about our users that helps to guide us as we move forward. Traditionally, these open-ended questions have been a great way for us to learn about the research issues our users care most about, which help us in the early stages of research brainstorming for our internal projects.

5. We use your responses as part of a larger impact measurement model.

Being a data-driven organization, measuring our impact has been important to us since the beginning. More recently, Faunalytics has been working hard to reinterpret our theory of change, and enhancing our impact measurement model, including all of our programs and resources, outreach activities, and communications channels. We want to make sure that all of our activities we’re engaged in not only stretch the value of each dollar we receive, but that they help achieve positive change for animals. Your feedback is essential for us to know how we’re doing and what we can do to improve. If you think there are particular areas where we’re doing a great job, the survey is a great place to let us know that, too!