Surveys on Substack: What You Need to Know (Part 1)
This new feature just dropped. Here's how it looks for a reader...
Hey there,
Hope you had a great week.
Substack just launched another new feature to help us creators do our newlettering faster and better.
It’s reader surveys.
Nope not polls, but surveys. Different beasts entirely.
Polls are embedded within posts on Substack whereas surveys exist on separate pages. With polls, readers can see how others have answered, but for surveys, the results are private.
Readers navigate to a survey by clicking a button in an email or post.
If you click the button above you’ll be taken to a survey I just created. Go ahead and check it out, so you can see what it is like from a reader’s perspective.
If you want to add a survey to a post choose ‘Link to Survey’ from the Button's dropdown list in your post editing window. You will be given the option to create a new survey if you don’t want to use the default survey (‘New Reader Survey’).
NOTE: I had trouble doing this, the survey I created didn’t save properly and I lost all my work.
The other way to make a survey is from the (new) ‘Reader surveys’ section of the Stats tab of your publication dashboard.
Publication dashboard > Stats > Reader surveys [tab] > + Create new survey [button]
Substack’s Default Reader Survey
By the way, the default survey is… bleh… It’s like signing up to an old-fashioned newspaper subscription, where they want to know your age and gender and where you hang out online. Doesn’t sit right with me.
Click the button below to check out the default survey (New Reader Survey) that is available in every publication’s survey list.
Warning
Default welcome emails have the default reader survey included. If you haven’t edited your welcome email and don’t want the survey button in the email, go and edit that now.
Learn more
To learn more about how to use surveys, check out the help article from Substack. Link is below:
How do I use surveys on Substack? – Substack, Inc
What do the results look like? Check out my other post by clicking the preview box below.
Substack Reader Surveys, Part 2: Viewing and Using Results
That’s it for this week. Have a good weekend!
Thanks for keeping us up to date, Karen! This seems like a great new feature. I've added it to the emails for free and paid subscribers.
In case it's of interest to anyone, here is the email I send to new paid subscribers. I'd love to see others' emails. Maybe we should do a pop-up workshop for surveys? :)
The subject line is "How can I help?"
Building community is a big part of why I continue to write on Substack.
I’d love it if you could take this short survey to let me know why you upgraded your subscription.
(survey button)
Now that you are a member, you’ve also unlocked the the full archive. Here are three posts that have been especially useful to readers. If you can tell me a little more about your interests, I can also point you to previous posts that you might enjoy.
The Big Quit (My first feature for The Chronicle of Higher Education, which tracks the impact of the Great Resignation on academe, specifically the departure of tenure-line faculty like me.)
Don’t go to school just to be poor (Gertrude Nonterah, creator of The Bold PhD, recounts her disillusionment with postdoctoral research and her awakening as a medical communications professional.)
How to break writer’s block as a memoirist (A surefire strategy for generating ideas for personal essays while also identifying story-worthy scenes.)
Thanks for joining The Recovering Academic community!
Josh
Good work, as usual, young lady!