Wow, you folks are AMAZING! 330 of you responded to our Newsletter Audience Survey. The reason we launched the survey in the first place is that over the last year, we’ve been developing a ground-up renovation of the TeamRCIA website (which 72% of you said you found easy to navigate. Yay!).
Now that we have a fancy new rocket ship to take us anywhere we want to go, we wanted to understand what your biggest concerns are about your ministry in the catechumenate. And you really came through.
What were the goals of the survey?
Our goals for the survey were to find out who is reading the newsletter and what TeamRCIA resources are most used or most desired by the readers. We also wanted to get a better sense of the newsletter itself and how useful it is to you.
We have frequently sent out quick feedback requests that have one to five questions. But this was different. This survey was about 25 questions, some of which took a bit of thought. Your feedback gives us so much hope about this ministry and also gives us a lot of information about how to go forward.
We are planning to spend several months really digging into the things you said, and it is way too early to tell what all that will mean for TeamRCIA in the future. But here are a few highlights that might interest you.
What our readers want to learn about
While it isn’t a surprise, it is good to know that 93% of you who responded think it is very important to keep up with information about catechumenate ministry (8 or higher on a 1-10 scale).
To that end, 65.5% of you who responded said you read the TeamRCIA newsletter regularly, and 83% of you said you found the newsletter almost always useful or usually useful. Half of you (52%) said the reason for that is that you trust TeamRCIA and feel it is a credible source of information. A whopping 94.6% of you said the length of the newsletter was just right, and 84.4% said the frequency of receiving the newsletter was just right. (And we want to shout out to the 7.6% of you that want to hear from us more frequently 😀.)
We asked you to choose from a list of five the three topics you are most interested in hearing more about. All five came out pretty evenly, but by a slim margin, these are the top three, in order:
- Evangelization and precatechumenate
- How to catechize from the liturgy
- Mystagogy
Our readers really want to hear about evangelization and precatechumenate, how to catechize from the liturgy, and mystagogy.
One of the most interesting replies (to us anyway) was to the question about how you first learned about TeamRCIA. More than a third of you (35.5%) said you learned about us from someone in your parish or diocese. Word of mouth is always the best way to let others know about TeamRCIA. So thank you to all of you who talk about us to your collogues and friends. And thank you in advance to those of you who didn’t know it mattered but will now start talking about us to others!
The last one we’ll share with you in this update is your response to “If TeamRCIA ceased to exist tomorrow, you would _____.” 70% of you filled in the blank saying you would “feel you’ve lost a source of information that you can’t find anywhere else.” That really affirms us. When we started this ministry more than 15 years ago, we did so because there was no resource for ourselves—the questions we had and the support we needed. We thought we surely couldn’t be the only ones experiencing the gap. So we set out to create something that didn’t yet exist. We’re thrilled to know that mission is still resonating with so many of you.
Where we’re going next
We’re going to use all of your thoughtful answers to take a long look at what we are currently offering you and what we can offer in the future. You’ve already given us some great ideas, and we know more will surface as we dig deeper into the survey results. Thanks to all who took the time to share your thoughts. We are so very grateful for your support.
For those of you who missed the survey or didn’t have time to fill it out, please share one thought with us in the comments below about how TeamRCIA can help you in your ministry in the future.
