SURVEY: What is the outcome?

We had over 60 responses to our survey, which required a begging letter to freeonlinesurveys.com, who kindly let us get our data, despite going over the 50 limit! So we’ve put it all in a pdf for everyone to see (download at the bottom of the article).

According to the survey, match reports and results are the most popular articles that we publish, with the weekend preview in third place with photos closely followed behind. We’re quite pleased around two thirds of people read the weekend preview as it takes a while to write up each week, which explains why we have to miss it out every now and then.

Individual championships are the most popular competitions, followed by Elite League and Regional competitions. We accidentally left out the Club Championships, but we should imagine it’s around the same score as the British Team Cup, if not slightly higher due to the amount of clubs that have teams in the various competitions.

87.5% of readers want to see all clubs producing match reports and previews. This is something we can only encourage, if clubs do not currently have press officers actively sending in articles, perhaps it’s something that can be sorted out in the close season.

Our content rating on average was rated as “good” by the majority, with “it’s ok” and “excellent” receiving an even amount of votes. Photos and Videos took a big chunk in the excellent column. Thankfully only two votes were registered as “poor” and about seven “not good” (5 votes per person on this question).

As far as the image of Cycle Speedway goes, 53% of readers felt Cycle Speedway’s image is “important”, with 39% believing it to be “crucial”. It’s flipped round for attracting new riders, where 56% of readers deem Cycle Speedway’s image to be crucial with 41% seeing it as “important”.

63% of readers rate the way we put across Cycle Speedway’s image as “very good”, with 20% saying it’s excellent. 17% feel our image is “ok”, thankfully no one said it was “not good” or “poor”!

Moving on to the name of Cycle Speedway, something which tends to divide opinion depending who you ask. 45% of people think the name is “good and describes what the sport is”, a further 25% feel it is “perfect and shouldn’t change”. Four people weren’t bothered either way, 16% don’t like it, but accept it’s the name of the sport and only 8% feel it’s “old fashioned and needs to change to attract more riders”.

When describing Cycle Speedway to someone who has never seen it, a whopping 77% of readers describe it as “Copy of motor speedway, but on push bikes”. 17% as “velodrome on shale with full contact” and 6% as a motor speedway/Velodrome hybrid. Perhaps we should have added another question in to ask how the 77% would describe the sport to those who don’t know what motor speedway is!

38% of readers feel the relationship between motor speedway and cycle speedway is “quite important”, with 13% feeling it is “vitally important as it’s where we came from”. On the flip side 25% think it’s “not the be all and end all”, 14% think it’s “not important as we’re cyclists”, where as 11% have no opinion. So it’s about half and half overall.

88% of people who took the survey were male. Age ranges of 36-49, 50-59 and 60+ took an even amount of the votes, between 22%-26%. Under 18s represented 10% of the vote and 18-25 took 15%. However, 26-35% took only 3% of the vote, which may or may not underline theories that the sport struggles with this age range.

The four regions were relatively evenly split, with the Northern section providing most of the representation and South and South Wales the fewest. Unfortunately none of our international friends took part in the survey.

A large 40% of the survey was completed by those who have been in the sport 21 years or more. with 4-8 years and 9-15 years receiving healthy chunks. 44% of the survey was completed by current riders, with retired riders, spectators and parents of riders taking an even slice of the remaining votes.

We also asked for comments about the image of the sport and the website and for any other feedback regarding 33/18 news. Those comments can be read in full on the PDF below.

Many thanks for those who took part, especially those for their nice comments about the job we’re doing, but more importantly, thank you for the constructive criticisms, as we always endeavour to improve our service.

Click here to down the 2014 End of season survey