We recently sent out our first MIDI Message newsletter and our goal was to do a survey to find out more about who MIDI Association members are, what their level of MIDI experience is and what kind of content and service they want The MIDI Association to provide.
We sent the survey to over 8000 members. We wanted to share all of the results of the survey as this is your community and we always want to provide complete transparency about the makeup of the community, what the community feels about MIDI and why we are focusing on certain kinds of content. The MIDI Association is a member-focused community so it should be our members who guide us in developing new resources.
You can still take the survey here. The MIDI Association Survey.
If you’d like to comment on the survey or newsletter, we started a forum thread here.
The MIDI Message #1-The Survey Says!
First, here is chart of the members that were sent the survey segmented by how they had registered their MIDI Experience on the site .
So how do the results of the survey compare to the balance of users in the registration process? We thought that maybe some people didn’t bother to change the level and so their profile says “Newbie”, but they may actually have more experience.
Also it’s natural that members who are developers and experts are more invested in MIDI and so more likely to fill out a survey. Even taking that into account the survey results are a bit surprising.
The percentage of Newbies in the responses to the survey is very small compared to the percentage of Newbie Profiles and percentage of experts is high.
So if you are NOT a Newbie and just didn’t bother to change the level when you registered, please do it when you get a chance. We are also looking at changing the Profile section to include more information so we can tailor and customize content for different members profiles. We’d like to include the following questions in the registration profile.
Which one of the following best describes how you use MIDI.
The result for this question also jumped out at us in looking at the survey results.
23% of the people who answered the survey indicated they were developers. So we know that there are at least 222 MIDI developers who have registered as members.
This mirrors the survey question above. Which one of the following best describes how you use MIDI.
We really encourage you to update your profile as we will use this information to customize the content that we provide you in the future.
So what kind of content did members want. It’s not surprising that given the profiles of the people who filled out the survey, there were lots of recommendations for programming resources, detailed in-depth articles and specifications. On the other hand, there were a lot of members who needed much more basic and practical how to’s on MIDI. Here is the summary of the content question.
As this question was a ranking, the lower the mean number, the more important the content was. Given the number of experts and developers who answered the survey, it’s not surprising that most important content was information on new specifications, then in-depth articles.
So where do we go from here.
First, we are looking in detail at the hundreds of detailed comments. Here are some word clouds from those comments. Later on we plan on doing articles and forum posts on specific topics.
