Shortly before The Treasurer’s relaunch in July 2012, we ran a reader survey in order to discover your opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of the magazine, and what you would like to see in the publication in the future. Since then, we have not only relaunched the magazine, we have given The Treasurer its own online home at www.treasurers.org/thetreasurer, with complete digital editions and exclusive web content released throughout the month to complement the printed version. After a full year of the new-look magazine, we decided the time was right to follow up our initial research with a second survey to find out what you think of the changes we have made.
We sent out email invitations to complete the survey, as well as promoting it in the July/August 2013 issue of The Treasurer, through the magazine’s Twitter account (@thetreasurermag) and via the ACT’s LinkedIn group. The results make very interesting reading.
We were really pleased with both the quality and quantity of your responses (the response rate was over 6%). But we have to confess upfront, that there is one key area where it seems we need to improve. Just over half of respondents (52%) answered ‘No’ to the question: ‘Did you know that The Treasurer has its own microsite with exclusive web content at www.treasurers.org/thetreasurer?’ We’ll therefore be working hard to raise awareness of the site over the coming months.
The Treasurer’s website went live in January 2013, and in addition to PDF downloads and complete digital editions of the magazine (and a digital archive stretching back over the past 10 years of The Treasurer), we upload online-exclusive news stories, reports and video. Readers can also carry on the conversation through comments on the articles, and via the ACT’s lively LinkedIn group.
Having a dedicated platform for The Treasurer enables us to respond to more topical issues and to report on events that might be a little dated by the time the next issue of the magazine is published.
The site should also be useful for our international subscribers, some of whom mentioned that they wait some time for their copies of the magazine to arrive by post. The online content is posted the same day as the printed magazine is dispatched from the mailing house, so that all our members and subscribers have access to The Treasurer’s magazine content from the day of publication. In addition, the site is updated with new web-only stories on a weekly basis, which are freely available to all visitors, so keep checking back throughout the month.
A major element of the relaunch was updating the look of the magazine. We were delighted to see that so many of you like the improvements we’ve made to the design (91% of respondents rated the magazine design as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’), particularly with regard to the use of bold, striking infographics to give the publication a more contemporary feel (an 88% positive reaction from respondents).
It was also heartening to see that 75% of respondents spend more than 30 minutes reading each issue of The Treasurer. This compares with 69% of you in last year’s survey, which suggests a greater engagement with the magazine, and perhaps reflects our decision to broaden our content and balance lengthy technical articles with shorter opinion pieces.
We asked which of The Treasurer’s regular features you read. We were predicting a wide range of responses and those we got show that every section of the new-look magazine is finding an audience. The additional comments we received bore out this view. We might have expected the student section to have a small readership, as only a limited proportion of The Treasurer’s audience is studying for treasury qualifications, but with 68% of respondents either always or sometimes reading that section, we were pleased to see that it seems to be of interest and value to a wider section of our readership. Perhaps they are keeping up with their CPD?
One of the main goals of The Treasurer is to provide the technical information that you need on both a day-to-day and a strategic level. We knew from last year’s survey that this is a key priority for our readers, so we were not surprised to see that the Briefing, Technical briefing and Treasury essentials sections were by far the most frequently read, with the Profile interviews, Core elements articles and Economic trends column close behind.
Of our three regular columnists, ACT chief executive Colin Tyler will be relieved to see that he is the most regularly read, beating both Jeremy Warner and Andrew Sawers.
We were delighted to read your reasons for reading The Treasurer. All the options in this question attracted a greater response than last year. Just under 85% of respondents selected ‘Relevant, up-to-date technical information’, compared with 76% in the 2012 survey. Similarly, our move to reflect the magazine’s international readership (over half of its 10,500 readers are now based outside the UK) by adopting an international outlook in the editorial appears to have been popular. The number of respondents reading The Treasurer for ‘international insight’ has surged from just under 28% in 2012 to 44% in 2013.
Interest in reading the magazine for ‘continuing professional development’ has also grown from 46% to 67% over the past 12 months, perhaps due to the launch of the ACT’s CPD scheme. The most dramatic increase, however, was ‘business analysis’ – selected by 33% of readers as a reason to read The Treasurer in 2012. But this climbed to an impressive 51% for 2013, thanks to our new features such as the Economic trends column and articles on emerging markets.
These dramatic increases indicate an increased engagement with the magazine’s content across the full range of our editorial coverage, and we’ll look carefully at the responses to this question in future surveys.
Thanks to all of you who took the time to respond to the survey. We value our relationship with our readers, and we are glad that so many of you support the new editorial direction that The Treasurer has taken. We also received a wide range of opinions where we asked for additional comments or suggestions, which have all been read and considered. We will continue to refine the magazine to meet the developing needs of treasurers, and value your continued feedback and suggestions on ways in which we can improve further.
Andrew Lawston is publishing manager at the ACT
