This document summarizes the results of a readership survey conducted by the marketing team of North by Northwestern (NBN). Key findings include that NBN has a strongly female readership, especially among first and second year students. It also has readership across Northwestern schools. The survey found opportunities to engage more male readers and seniors. Readers enjoy NBN's campus coverage and multimedia content. There is potential to attract more readers through social media promotion and differentiating NBN's news coverage from competitors. The marketing team provided recommendations on content focus areas and promotion strategies based on the survey results.

1. NORTH BY
NORTHWESTERN
READERSHIP
SURVEY
Prepared by
NBN MARKETING

2. We asked Northwestern...
HOW they experience NBN,
WHERE they experience NBN,
WHAT they think about NBN,
WHO is reading NBN and
WHY they read NBN
And, we got 615 respondents

3. GOALS
To help you (the staff)
understand your readers and
know your audience
To help build a framework for
NBN's future development
To reach more readers and
continue to grow traffic

4. L.L. NBN
(Ladies Love NBN)

5. Findings &
Recommendations
We have a strongly female readership at all
levels
Occasional female readers are a huge
demographic—think about how women
might kill time on NBN and how to turn them
into heavy users
Think about how to draw in more males...

6. What Year
Are you?
Sophomores
Freshmen
Juniors
Seniors
Note: graph shows
FREQUENT readers

7. This is Puf, the Magic Dragon
How can we avoid this effect?

8. Findings &
Recommendations
nd
Our readership is predominately 1st/2
years
Find ways to prevent reader (and writer)
attrition
Seek out more senior writers to discuss
issues that apply to higher grades

9. Where do you live?
Note: breakdown is for
frequent readers

10. Which school are you in?
Frequent readers

11. Findings &
Recommendations
We have a really good spread of readership across
schools
We have a great Medill following (but could
probably do better!)
We have readers in McCormick that we should cater
to in the hopes of gaining share of those schools
(here's looking at you, Schroeder)
We have ample opportunity to build readers in
close-knit schools such as RTVF and Comm (more
on that later)

12. Greeks
Findings &
Recommendations
We've succeeded at capturing Greek interest, still
room for growth
Interesting that only 11% (of 35%) live in Greek
houses, most likely due to age (recent pledges).
Bottom line is to maintain relevant content but not to
limit marketing to the houses

13. What are your afliations?

14. How did I get here?

15. Findings &
Recommendations
Our main page is incredibly important to readers
Encourage people to bookmark the homepage
Keep this in mind for future redesigns
Never underestimate the power of Facebook
Post your articles (and articles you like) to your wall
as often as possible

16. Come here often?
LOSERS

17. Findings &
Recommendations
This one is a little trickier to draw conclusions
from
We have an incredibly strong niche (~35%) of
respondents who read frequently
Most people come to NBN on occasion when you
refer them
Again, refer your friends! Spread dialogue
Advertise specific articles more often
Think of ideas for ways to push people up a notch
i.e. from once a week to 2-3 times a week

18. Patience.
People are really willing to stay and read good
articles
Think of new ways to get sticky (pull people from
one article to another)
Improved “also on” buttons/options
Autoplay videos and galleries
Slots at the bottom of pages?

19. Location, Location,
Location.
Virtually all of our readers check NBN in the dorms
Key for advertising. You will get more requests from
Marketing in the future to print and post some fliers
No class is safe from our home page
Pop it up in lecture halls, cause some mass distraction

20. Content.
We have these statistics from analytics, but it's interesting to see how this
one pool responds. In the future we could seek correlations between
sections and find which overlap the most to guide “sticky linking”
Keep an eye on that News bar, more to come later

21. Front Page News.
Teaser is mighty. Slots are only half as utilized. This supports our
multiple-teaser focus for a redesigned home page
Feedback loops rule. Let's increase visibility of our most popular
Room for improvement with Recently Commented

22. Inside the mind
of an NBN Reader

23. Findings &
Recommendations
About half of respondents claim to come to NBN out
of direct interest. But more than half just want to be
distracted, and half read when referred by someone
Again, REFER YOUR FRIENDS. Post articles,
retweet, brandish the front page when possible.
Hopefully some MERCHANDISING will help in the
near future ;)
This is an important point about our positioning in the
minds of NU students. Like most great internet sites
we are a place to spend some free time when in need
of distraction. We should embrace this reputation to
some extent and think hard about ways to capture
attention

24. What else do you read?

25. Competitors.

26. One more graph on this...
Of Daily Northwestern Readers

27. Findings &
Recommendations
We have a lot of overlap with the Daily. Who would have thought? It
seems a lot of people read the Daily newspaper when they grab one and
read NBN when online. The main difference is that people look at the
Daily as news source, and NBN as a hipper, funnier, feature driven
publication. They generally say that NBN is very fun and entertaining, and
more relevant to campus life, but that the Daily has more “hard news”.
This overlap teaches a key lesson, especially about News: find ways to
differentiate our news section from the Daily and from major
newspapers. Lots of NBNers get this info from other places, make sure
we have a different approach and our own angles
Also, NU Intel is doing very well. While we do want to compete, let's make
sure to not copy as a large portion of our readers will notice. However,
this question and answers to later questions show that we should find
some way to pull toward Intel's direction of being very “local” and
highlighting intimate pieces of student life

28. An elephant in the room.
One criticism that stuck out was the idea that NBN's writing
has “gone downhill.” Now, the internet is full of negative
comments, and most of these people would probably use
that expression on their favorite band too. Nevertheless we
should consider this in a constructive way
How was NBN changed over the last 3 years?
What did we do well in the 2006-2008?
How can we reclaim our strengths from the early days
without compromising future growth?

29. What would you like to
see more of?
Publication:
>Pictures of actual students here
>More hard copies
>A less busy homepage
>More options for campus advertising on the site
>Online coupons
>More feature stories
>24@NU
For laughs: Just wish it was more accessible. The Daily is
in paper form everyday. NBN forces you to seek it out.
What?

30. What would you like to
see more of?
Of-Campus Coverage:
>”Hard news stories. I usually read the Daily for that and NBN for
other stuff. But it would be awesome if I could read both on NBN.”
>International News and students opinions on it.
>Explanations of important issues that are difficult to
understand,so almost like a "politics and news for dummies"
section (Eg. "Breakdown of the proposed healthcare bill")
>More about Chicago - places students can go out to eat, hang out,
concert venues, etc.
>More on places in town, like the restaurants. Like an interactive
feature on different streets in Evanston & places to eat, with
ratings and prices and whatnot.
>Sports. Sports. Sports.
>”NBN has NOTHING in science journalism - what's up with that?”

31. What would you like to
see more of?
Campus Coverage:
>Spotlight coverage of student groups and students
>Hot NU gossip
>”Learning about something that happened on campus that I
might not have known happened otherwise--like the streakers in
the sorority quad”
>”I REALLY love when you take something about NU or a college
students at NU's lives and make them more interesting such as
when you did the report of cell service on campus, or the
valentines day chocolate information.”
>Love the sex articles, but keep them well-humored or they get
“weird”
>More stories on the nerdier side of Nerdwestern. NBN is very hip,
which is good, but it makes you lose sight of what life is like on our
campus.

32. What would you like to
see more of?
Entertainment/Multimedia:
>Our readers LOVE multimedia
>More interactive features
>More guides
>More comics
>More video and photos generated by students. Gertonberg is
a huge hit and our readers would love more like it

33. Analysis.
There seems to be two distinct "pulls" in the responses,
perhaps indicating that NBN attracts two distinct
demographics. Namely, many people seem to be
advocating for more "news" which is to say information
from beyond the Northwestern campus (local, national,
international, also covering "culture" aspects such as
music, movies, sports). Yet at the same time, there is an
equal pull for a more localized coverage, meaning more
reporting on Northwestern "News", the activities and
profiles of student groups, student sports, etc.
This is an interesting issue to handle. Perhaps we could
set quotas for each or divide some functional aspect of
the site based on these criteria

34. Also...
>”More Lisa Gartner”
>”More Dan Campanovo. He is awesome”
>”Amanda Litman runs train”
>”I hope Emily Chow gets paid for her kickass photos!”
>”More Kazaam!” ???
>I love NBN! (x9000)

35. Closing Time.
That's enough for one presentation, but there's still plenty more that
Marketing can do with your section. If there's one thing we learned
from this survey, lots of readers out there still don't know about NBN
but would love to read more if they thought about it more often. So
for now:
>Keep up the good writing!
>Be proud of your work: link articles on Facebook
>Talk to your friends about NBN. Don't let anyone get away with not
knowing that acronym
>Really, anyone. Unforgivable.
You all know NBN best, and each of you can help make this a
better and more well-known publication on campus
Lastly we suggest you wear some of these...