These are the findings of new audience research into community radio listenership conducted by McNair Ingenuity between March and May 2006 and launched by Senator the Honorable Helen Coonan, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.

The results show that the number of Australians aged 15+ listening to community radio in an average month has risen from 7,054,000 people (45%) in 2004 to 7,515,000 people (47%) in 2006.

“That's more than four million listeners every week” commented the CEO of McNair Ingenuity Matt Balogh “...an audience that would be the envy of any commercial network.”

To read about more about the survey, click here

To see the full survey results on CBOnline, click here

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It's almost impossible to find an example of a listener survey that you could use 'off the shelf' – this is partly because many surveys are made by marketing companies who, of course, want you to pay for the product. But it's also because every survey for every station is different - what you put into it, what you ask, who you ask and how you ask it will really depend on what you're trying to get out of it. So any resources you do find will generally have to be fairly seriously customized for your station and your purpose.

Below however are some very good resources for guiding you through the process of developing an audience survey.

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This is a guide for creating your own listener surveys. It's designed to help people who are not market research experts and who don't have a lot of time to learn about audience surveying – ie: community broadcasters. This kit was designed for American National Public Radio (NPR) stations – who have many similarities to Australian community broadcasters.

This is a very easily readable resource and deals with questions such as:

• How many people should I survey and how do I select them?
  
• Are pledges during a radiothon a good indicator of a programs audience size?
  
• How do I actually use the results?

It also includes a large range of sample questions that you may want to use in your survey.

To view the The Listener Survey Toolkit, click here

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Joy Melbourne regularly undertakes listener surveys. Below is an example of two slightly different surveys they have used.

The first example is a simple listener survey that JOY conducted in the lead up to putting in their licence application. This one is very useful as it is a relatively simple survey, and it comes with the results, plus notes for people doing the phone 'interviews'. So with this example you really get not only some ideas for what to ask, but some extra insight into how to conduct the survey and how to examine the results. Obviously you would need to alter some of the questions to be relevant to your audience / area - but you could certainly make good use of this example as a starting point.

The second document is a 'lifestyle survey'. It's really designed to find out who your audience is – how old are they, what to they do, what do they spend money on etc… rather than how many listeners you have. This type of information is very important when deciding on your programming, promotional activities and of course, selling sponsorship. It can give you the 'proof' you need to convince a sponsor that the type of people who listen to your station are the type of people who would buy their products. Again, many of the questions won't be totally relevant to your situation - but hopefully they can act as inspiration for you to come up with similar ones that are right for you.

This is a publication put together by the Australia Council. Unlike the Listener Survey Cookbook, it is not written specifically for radio stations. It is also larger and not quite as easy to read – however it is an extremely thorough and useful resource and while it's not specifically targeted at radio, most of the information is very relevant.

To view this document, click here