2016 Annual Survey Results (Thank You!)
2016 Annual Survey Summary
A total of 135 people took our annual survey; a 17% increase over last time...but just 19% of our membership. The silent majority remains, but your outspoken brethren have represented you well. The average age was 49, with outliers at 26 and 71 years of age. 74% were men, and 26% were women...and a full 94% of you live in the USA.
What follows is our review, but you are welcome to view the survey results online here.
Please Note: The web format does not include individual responses; but we have aggregated them here behind the scenes.
Membership Overview
Most of you found Endurance Nation through a referral (34%) or a Google search (29%)...who would have guessed that?
You were very active...a full 64% of you completed a Half Iron / 70.3, with 56% of you doing a Full Ironman®. The next two most popular events were Sprint or Olympic Triathlons (48%) and Half Marathons (47%). No slackers here!
Three quarters of you have tried to refer someone to Endurance Nation -- thanks, that means a ton! We hope that trend continues.
Our three most popular training plans were the OutSeason®, EN*FULL and EN*HALF plans...with the GetFaster plan in fourth place. You guys aren’t afraid to do the work!
Most of you view your Training Plan online via the My Plan page, or the Mobile webview or Dashboard...but a surprising 20% of you print it out. Time to get that organized better for you.
Technology
81% of you login at least once daily. There was an equal split between laptops and mobile/tablet usage. A surprising 14% of you still own desktop computers! Just kidding!
You confessed equally to loving the Dashboard and the Forums. A close second were the in-depth resources of the Wiki and Training Plan Central.
Note: There were several individual requests for a dedicated “training plan app” to make viewing and using the plan more intuitive. We are thinking about it!
Most surprising of all 30% of you don’t use the coach videos / podcasts attached to each week of your training plan. These videos are actually really useful -- ignore them at your own risk!
Over 40% of you only post to the forums once a month...we hope that picks up as the Forums are a huge part of making you smarter. Our feedback from us, your coaches, is that over the years we’ve seen a direct correlation between forum participation and race day performance: athletes who ask, and answer, questions learn more about endurance training and racing, and this is reflected in their results. Your teammates are incredible people to learn from and train alongside, and we encourage you to participate!
EVERYONE had advice on how we could improve your web experience. Without a doubt improving the search function and speeding up the website were the top two spaces. There were many other suggestions ranging from how we store content (noted!) to how our forums could be more like Slowtwitch.com (no comment).
Learning & Resources
Some asked why were aren’t doing Master Racing Pages anymore when we still are -- they just moved -- Resources > Master Racing Pages > Then click on the name of your race.
Others had no idea that we have Race Execution Page and a main Training Plan Central page for all plan resources.
Camps and Races
Only 15% of you attended an EN Camp, and 30% of you attended a Key Race. If you haven’t considered it, a Key Race is an incredible vibe for the Team and your family. There’s nothing like racing with 50 to 60 of your teammates if you can do it. You can view our 2017 calendar of events online here.
Note: Some of you pointed out that most of our Key Races are in the Eastern Time Zone. This is by definition a result of the demographics of our Team, the US race distribution and race timing. We do our best to consider all venues each year, we swear!
Those of you who did not participate in a Key Race, still want support. It’s not always easy to support races with less than five athletes, but our Race Director Brenda Ross and your teammate Laura Becker do help us with as many races as possible.
Support Experience
On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, our support ranked very well for being “friendly” but only moderately well for “clarity” and even less so for “timeliness.” It’s clear we can improve in both the clarity of our answers as well as how quickly we turn them around...and we are already making some staff changes behind the scenes for that.
Thanks for your feedback and continued support of Endurance Nation!!
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Comments
We are working on that, replacing that key race