BLOG 1 Jun 2015: Survey Initial Results

My thanks to the 44 people who completed the events survey this week.  I have made the prize draw and the £30 voucher for events at the studio has gone to Brian Parkin.  I look forward to seeing Brian at the studio in the coming months.

There is still a lot to do to fully analyse the results of the survey, but I wanted to share with you the initial analysis of the “interest level” in different types of events.  There have been a few surprises, and few things have come out as no surprise at all.

Initial Analysis – Average Interest

Participants we asked to rate different types of event between 0 (no interest) and 5 (very interested).  What came as no surprise is that there is a wide variety of very different interests.  To a certain extent this has made it difficult to analyse the results.  For example there was a significant number of respondents whose interest was mainly subjects such as glamour, art nude etc with little interest in non-model related events.  There was also a similar number of respondents who were the direct opposite with minimal interest in any event that involved nudity but with significant interest in topics such as table-top, commercial work etc.  This has an effect of cancelling out the differences in opinions and most topics scored an average score between 2 and 3 out of 5.

Here’s the average interest scores for each type of event:

And in graphical form….

The biggest surprise from this was the significant interest in strobist (off camera flash) techniques.  It came out on top by quite a large margin.  I have already been able to respond to this by rescheduling my “Learn to use your flash” workshop for Sunday 23rd August.  Already on the calendar for those interested in stobist techniques is our “Falling down & Floating Up” event, at least part of which will be shot in the park using off camera flash.

The interest in Art Nude came as no surprise it is consistently one of the most popular types of event at the studio.  A new event with Illy (aka Black Beauty) is now split between studio based art nude and location fashion using strobist techniques.  So hopefully this will broaden the appear of what should be an exciting event event further.

Friday Night Weighted Analysis

Just looking at the interest levels alone isn’t sufficient.  Let’s be honest for a moment – this is a business and I need to maximise my income in order to ensure I can continue to run events for local photographers.  Hypothetically, if I had 30 photographers all saying they were very interested in CosPlay shoots that would sound fantastic and it looks as though I should be running CosPlay shoots a lot.  But if between them none of them were planning to attend any Friday Night events, there is no point in running CosPlay shoots on a Friday Night.  On the other hand if I had just 5 photographers interested in Boudoir but all 5 of them are planing to attend 10 Friday Night events per year.  Then I ought to be running Boudoir events on a regular basis.

The above examples are not based on the survey, but I wanted to reanalyse the results taking using those principals. This may be a simplistic approach but I multiplied the interest level (0 – 5) by the number of events the person said they thought they would attend in the next 12 months. I then calculated the average score for each type of the event.  Here’s the results:

And in graphical form…

We can see from analysing the data this way there are one or two big changes in the ranking.  Most notable are Basic Portrature and Commercial Photography dropping down the list, while CosPlay and SteamPunk have both jumped up.  What this tells me is that there are photographers who want to learn the basics of portraiture, or who want to know more about commercial/stock photography, however these are not photographers who are likely to come to Friday Night events.

To respond to this I am going to run some one off events/workshops for specific interest groups I am announcing the first of those events today: “Back to Basics: Portraiture” which will be on Wednesday 1st July 7pm – 10pm.  I am also planing a full day event/workshop which will cover what you need to know about shooting stock photography, that event will be a mix of classroom training and an opportunity to shoot images suitable for library submission.

In Conclusion

There is much more I can and will say about the results of the survey.  More analysis and more changes to how I run events will be published over the coming weeks.  In the mean time, I want to again say thank you to everyone who responded to the survey, it is really, really helpful.

I hope the changes that will come out from it will make events at the studio even more attractive to you, and I look forward to seeing you at the studio in the very near future.