We're changing

At CONNEXIONS we are always concerned to improve the service we offer our readers. During the summer, we asked our subscribers, readers, and contributors to respond to a questionnaire and give us feedback on how they use CONNEXIONS and what they would like to see from us in the future. In September, we met for two full days to discuss the questionnaires, to review our financial situation, and to plan for CONNEXIONS' future. We would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of our learnings and decisions.

You have already. no doubt noticed one change. After some research by our new staff person. Ulli Diemer, we discovered it would be cheaper to use typesetting and we have started to do so with this issue. Not only will typesetting reduce our production costs, but it will make each issue thinner and, therefore, cheaper to mail. Unfortunately this one move will not answer all of our economic woes. We were badly affected by last January's increase in postal rates and find ourselves living closer to the wire than we had expected. For this reason, we have decided to produce only four issues per year, rather than the five we have been producing in the past few years.

So much for the bad news . . . on to the good news! We were very pleased with the response to our questionnaire. The response rate was about 25% (very good, we're told by the statisticians) and represented a good geographical cross-section. We discovered that about half the respondents had used CONNEXIONS to develop new contacts with other social change agents. We wondered why more weren't using the publication as a networking tool and thought this might be because we had not discussed with our readers how we thought CONNEXIONS might be useful to individuals and groups working for social change.

We did learn that our readers find our summaries most helpful when they outline resources produced, or describe groups, or present analysis of an issue or situation. On the other hand, fewer of our subscribers were interested in hearing others' strategies for change. This was somewhat surprising to us, as we had assumed it was very important to include strategies in our summaries. Both these learnings — on the use of CONNEXIONS as a networking tool and on our readers' particular information needs — suggested that we need to work at developing more regular and reliable forms of feedback and information sharing with our readers. We will be working on this in the future.

When we asked what kind of format you would like to see for CONNEXIONS in the future, we received some very helpful suggestions. More than two-thirds of our subscribers want us to continue producing theme centred editions. Some of the broad areas suggested for future issues were: the peace movement today, native issues, and housing (we guessed that one right!). the economy, the churches and social change, health, Asia, and Southern Africa. More than half our subscribers also invited us to include lead articles or an editorial from the CONNEXIONS collective on the theme. We found this an exciting possibility and, after much reflection and discussion, we decided to move on to a new format. Beginning with the next issue on "Women and Men", we will include commentary and more in-depth coverage of the issue with our summaries. We look forward to your comments and criticisms on these new directions.

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