Who are you and what do you want? – The results from our supporter survey.

Date: 9 December 2011

Over the summer we asked you to fill in our supporter survey to let us know a bit more about yourself and what you think of WDM and our campaigns. A big thank you to the over 1100 of you who responded! The results have been really interesting and will be invaluable in helping us improve our campaigns and communications. We thought you might be interested too and so here is a brief summary of what we found.

As a WDM supporter you are nine per cent more likely to be female than male and you have ages ranging from 14 to 92 with an average age of 54. If you’re not retired then you’re most likely to be either studying or employed in the education, charity or medical sectors. Your favourite read is The Guardian, followed by The Independent, New Internationalist and The Observer.

You’re clearly a very active and committed group of people. Ninety two per cent of you financially support other charities, with two thirds supporting other international development charities. Environmental charities, other campaigning organisations and human rights charities also each have the financial support of at least half of you. Additionally, nearly 60 per cent of you are members of some type of local group, including church groups, environmental campaigning groups and other international development groups. Fifteen per cent of you are involved with your local WDM group and thirty eight per cent of you have attended a WDM event.

We asked you what you thought of our campaigns. Around two thirds of you said WDM’s campaigns are important, while only seven per cent felt they were unique and only 20 per cent felt they were inspiring. You had a slight preference for our campaign on food speculation. In future you’d most like to see us campaigning on the World Bank and IMF, with food rights, water and environmental justice also top priorities.

When we asked you what you most liked about WDM and what you would most like to change some common themes emerged. You most appreciated WDM’s well-researched and detailed campaigns and the way we communicate these with clear and quality materials. The fact that the movement challenges injustice was important to you, as was the fact that we campaign on key but often difficult issues which get to the root causes of poverty, and aren’t afraid to take on the powerful in the process, thereby making more of a difference than if we tackled more superficial issues.

Among the things that you would like to change about WDM was our profile: our name and the fact that we are not more widely known. You would also like us to work more with other campaigning groups and engage better with younger people. A fair number of you also requested simpler campaigns materials.

You were happy with the level of service you receive from WDM. Eighty seven per cent of you said we contact you the right amount, with eight per cent of you wanting more contact from us. In addition, a third of you said you would like to receive more information from us about our campiagns such as our Think Global monthly email. Of those of you that have contacted the office, 78 per cent gave the response you received either a four or five out of five. Many of you commented that our supporter services are impressive given limited staff resources. One particular area for improvement that you noted was around getting prompt replies to emails and we hope you will soon begin to see improvements in this.

Thanks once again to all who responded. It has been really useful to hear your voices and find out more about you and we really appreciate the time you gave up to enable that. Lastly, congratulations to the two lucky winners of the book tokens!