Staying in touch

Every month, your North Dakota LIVING magazine provides you with stories, features, recipes, photos, local co-op news, editorial comments and advertising information. We hope we provide you with content you want in a publication that is pleasing to read. We also hope you let us know whether or not we are meeting your needs.

We are in the business of communication and we know communication works best when it flows both ways. To improve our communication with our readers, we periodically undertake a formal process to find out what you like or dislike about North Dakota LIVING. In the past, we conducted random telephone readership surveys every couple of years to gauge reader views and attitudes.

While telephone surveys have given us a lot of good information in the past, we tried a couple of new approaches recently to save costs and to open new channels of communication. First, we sent a survey by mail to a randomly selected list of 2,000 magazine subscribers requesting their opinions about the magazine. Second, we offered all magazine readers the option of completing the same survey online at the Web site for the North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives, www.ndarec.com. To learn more about the specific survey questions and answers, see the story on page 28.

We were very gratified that more than 650 readers took the time to return the mail survey or to complete the online survey. We were very pleased that the random mail survey drew responses from more than 430 readers for a very good response rate of almost 22 percent. In addition, more than 230 readers filled out our first-ever online survey. While the online results do not constitute a random, scientific sample, we were pleased that many younger readers used this means to communicate with us about their thoughts on the magazine.

All reader feedback is important to us, and we plan to study the survey results carefully and thoughtfully consider the many suggestions made by our readers. Suggestions include more human interest stories, articles about North Dakota history and recipes. 

We are pleased when our readers tell us they love reading North Dakota LIVING. It gives us a nice boost of energy. But we also need to hear from you when you don’t think we have lived up to your expectations. Your candor helps us refocus our efforts to bring you an improved publication.

We want to hear from you, not just when we do a survey, but whenever you have something you want to tell us—good or bad. One way you can do this is to send us a note addressed to: Editor, North Dakota LIVING, P.O. Box 727, Mandan, ND 58554. Another good way to express your views is to click on the “Contact Us” link to send us your comments and suggestions. When you stop at our Web site, click on the “Community Calendar” to get a full list of events around the state or check out our archive of North Dakota LIVING recipes. There’s lots of other information as well, including links to the Web site of your local co-op and many of our magazine advertisers.

We don’t want reader feedback to be just once in a while. With the readership interest shown in our mail and online surveys, we expect to build on what we learned and conduct other surveys later this year.

In the meantime, we encourage you to keep in touch and let us know what’s on your mind.