Executive Brief - April 2010

prepared by Erin Nieves

Swank MS Diet Constituency Survey April 2010 Overview:

This document is an overview of the constituency survey for the Swank MS Diet Foundation. People surveyed are assumed to all be website users. The purpose of the survey was to better identifygeneral demographic information on this user group and to begin assessment on their use of the foundation’s website. This is a high level summary of the results from the survey. For more details, it is recommended that you review the analysis provided by the survey tool used.

Survey Invitations: 2,708
Survey Completions: 508
Percentage sampling: 18.75% (A desired random sampling is 20%, we achieved close to that number with surveys completed.)

Demographic Overview:

Our survey indicates that our constituency is largely made up of women with 81% of our responders indicating female as gender. Survey findings shows the people using the website fall between the ages of 25 – 64 with a small percentage over and under to low and high age of this spread. A majority ofresponders have been given a confirmed diagnosis of MS (87%) and 63% are followers of the MS diet. The largest groups of dieters (43%) have identified themselves as "Experienced" Dieters (on the dietfor1-5 years). Geographic location of responders had only three “large” geographic groups; Oregon, California (both at 7%) and Outside the US (24%). The largest groups of responders are employed with 61% indicating having employment of some kind.

Website Usage:

Our responders use the foundation website. Usage falls almost evenly into the category optionsprovided by the survey. Question #11 was designed to affirm the website categories but needs to be read in context with answers to Question #10. Question #10 was designed to give more granularinformation on use of the subareas on the website and gives an initial indicator of areas most and leastused on the site. Six of these subareas show less than 10% of usage by our responders. Of these 6areas, 2 are the revenue generating areas of the site. The most used areas on the site are the ones youwould suspect; The Diet(75%), About the Diet (66%), About Dr. Swank (59%), Message Boards (55%), Home (55%), About Swank MS Foundation (52%), About MS (49%), MS Diet Book (47%), andSupplements (42%). Question #12 was an open ended question, allowing responders to “dream” a bit about the foundation. The answers were meant to be a springboard to the vision process that will beginafter a Swank Advisory Board is assembled.

Summary:

One can perhaps assume that our survey results are partially due to the 80/20(%) rule. With an 18.75% response rate, we are hearing from our “best” website users. Although I believe we can concur that the vast majority of people who responded to the Swank Foundation Survey interact with the foundationthrough the website, a few of the comments indicate that some individuals were unaware that the Foundation had a website. There are areas of the website that are not being used with enoughfrequency to be giving this much web space to content. The first to be done is improving the revenuegenerating areas on the site. The opportunity to donate needs to be on the home page and on the mostused areas on the site. Finding revenue sources for the Foundation is key to its long term growth and success.