Follow-up on reader survey

Thanks to the 25 people who responded to my reader survey! That’s nowhere near everybody who engages with the Pagan Families blog and its associated social media, but it’s enough responses to point toward some insights.

A bunch of people asked for Pagan Families on Pinterest. Guess what? We’re there, but I never update it. Also Google+. Same situation. So, are you a Pinterest whiz who loves Pagan Families? Want to volunteer to maintain our Pinterest page? Email me at paganfamilieseditor@gmail.com and tell me why you’d be fabulous at this.

On social media, readers overwhelmingly want to see links to our blog articles, and secondarily links to other resources around the web. Opportunities to make family announcements or to engage with discussion questions are also wanted, but it’s interesting to me that this isn’t as much as the blog articles. Pagan Families started as a blog, but a lot of its activity happens on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve really come to see moderating those spaces as a form of digital ministry (but that’s a topic for another time.) So I thought it was possible that some people would especially value that space, but the blog remains really important.

Readers want articles on a variety of topics, but parenting was on nearly everybody’s list. There were some suggestions for change:

• More book reviews! gosh, we already have a lot, but I know they’re popular and we can try to run more (psst, authors, please be in touch about sending us review copies)
• Update the visual design of this site. This design is the Patheos design and it’s only going to change if all of Patheos changes. Sorry if it’s not your favorite. We get a lot of other benefits from being a part of Patheos.
• Share more personal accounts of rituals and parenting moments. Sure! Writers, here’s how to submit them.
• Focus less on pregnancy and more on family life…

So, Pagan Families actually started with a pretty specific focus on pregnancy and birth and its been expanding gradually to cover more of family life in general. This is one of the major reasons I wanted to run a reader survey. My personal passion is for supporting folks in the childbearing year, and filling that gap in Pagan resources. There are lots of Pagan parenting websites, blogs, and books out there, but very few for fertility, pregnancy, birth, adoption, postpartum, and all the related topics. As Pagan Families has widened our scope, I feel like our focus has gotten fuzzy. But I’m hearing loud and clear from this survey that you like that scope wide.