Energypedia User Survey - Results 2017

Overview

In August 2017, we invited all our users to take part in our biennial survey to help us better understand their needs and improve our services. The survey took about 5-10 minutes to complete. It was open from 28^th of August until 3^rd of October 2017. A survey link was included on our website, sent via emails to all our registered users as well as spread via our communication channels such as newsletter, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

This page lists the main results.

The survey covered the following research questions:

• What is the energypedia user demographics?
• How and for what purposes do people use energypedia? What impact does energypedia have in their work?
• What is their level of satisfaction with energypedia?
• What motivates the users to get actively involved in the energypedia community?
  
• What should energypedia focus on in the future?
  

Our first energypedia survey was carried out in summer 2015. Find the results here.

While back in 2015 a total of 185 people took part in the survey, in 2017 264 respondents gave us their valuable feedback. To better understand the usage of energypedia, we divided our respondents into two groups namely: registered users having an energypedia user account and non-registered users who do not have an energypedia user account. Around 70% of the respondents were registered users, while 30% have not yet an account.

Overall Satisfaction

80% (159 respondents) are either very satisfied or satisfied with energypedia's overall services. 14% (28 respondents) are slightly satisfied while 0.5% (1 respondents) are not at all satisfied. 6.5% did not know.

Respondents Demographics 

Regions and Professions 

Out of the total 264 respondents, 186 already have an energypedia user account. Most respondents are based in Africa (37%), Asia (23%) and Europe (24%), whereas in 2015 most indicated to be located in Europe. Similar to 2015, respondents work mainly in the private sector (30%), followed by the non profit sector (21%) and the government sector (20%).

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Energypedia Usage

Reasons

According to the survey, most of our respondents use energypedia to keep themselves updated about the latest developments in renewable energy. However, over half of all respondents also use energypedia to draw on lessons learnt for improving their own projects and over 30% indicate to use energypedia for writing papers, proposals, articles and so on.

Impact

Thanks to energypedia, me or my organization had the following positive impacts:

“…Created access to renewable energy for 200 rural households”

“…I could write a report for the government”

“…Time saving research; access to lessons learnt; preventing mistakes in implementation.”

“…I gained new knowledge in the renewable energy sector, shared my organization’s work to a wide audience”

“…we were contacted by other experts”

“…Improved knowledge on stove production and distribution.”

Landing via...

Respondents indicated that the most frequent ways how to reach an energypedia article, are redirects from the newsletter and the search bar on energypedia. Furthermore, users click on the portal or the main pages or get recommendations by colleagues.

Visit Frequency

Most of our registered respondents visit energypedia every week (32%) or at least once a month (37%) while most of our non-registered respondents visit energypedia only once in a month (34%) or a few times per year (24%). 

Users Contribution

22% (48 respondents) of the total respondents said that they have at least once written or edited an article on energypedia while 78% (172 respondents) said that they have never done so. Out of those, 40% indicated that they did not know how to do it and 35% that they had no time. Most authors indicated that they have written a few articles.

Users Motivation

To further analyze the behaviour of our respondents on energypedia, we asked them what motivated or will motivate them to contribute to energypedia. Sharing information about renewable energy is one of the biggest motivations of most of the respondents. Authors (those that have already written articles) want to improve exiting articles, while passive readers (those who have not yet written an article) claim to be motivated by the fact that they could start a discussion with others in the field.

• All users want to see that their contribution would create benefits for others and/or the contribute to reaching the SDGs / energy access etc. "Improving the knowledge base for energy access", hence enabling progress towards universal energy access!

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Energypedia Services: Awareness and Usefulness

Usefulness of Different Information Portals of Energypedia 

According to the survey, the respondents value for their work mostly the  Renewable energy and energy efficiency Resource Center, the solar portal and the country profiles. 

Ease of Finding Information on Energypedia

Most of the respondents (80%) said that it is easy to find what they are looking for on energypedia (even more than in 2015 when only 66% stated that is was easy!). We hoped our efforts to make it easier for people to find the information they are looking for was successful. We improved the portals, included more linkages among the articles and encouraged authors to do so as well.

Services Offered by Energypedia

Awareness about Features

Most respondents were unaware of the reach of energypedia getting visited by 45,000 unique visitors each month. Furthermore, many were not aware that they may request training and restricted work spaces.

However, most respondents know about asking questions, starting discussions, sending news for our newsletter and posting events and jobs on energypedia.

Priorities

Most respondents indicated that we should focus on facilitating collaboration among all users (board-messaging, groups, discussions) and facilitate information about the energy sector (Newsletter, Group Mails, monthly notification alerts). We will continue to provide you with that!

Energypedia Newsletter

Out of the total respondents, 65% have subscribed to our monthly newsletter. Half of our subscribers read the newsletter every month and the other half occacionally. Readers find the newsletter interesting (67%) or partially interesting (33%).

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Advertisement on energypedia

Energypedia is free of charge. Two thirds of respondents would not mind if advertisements are placed on the top or the side of the page.

Respondents ask that ads are not too big in size, are relevant to the readers (no random unwanted adds) and are placed not too dominantly on the page covering the real information. However, in a well decorated way, not driving away attention of the users for the website, most agree that it could be an option to keep energypedia running.

Conclusion

This survey has provided us with some valuable insights about the energypedia community as well as their usage of energypedia.

According to the survey, most of our respondents are satisfied with energypedia and regularly use energypedia to keep themselves updated about renewable energy topics. However, we will coordinate our priorities according to what you told us. We will continue to promote how to work on energypedia to let everyone (registered or not) know how to create articles, promote their story and contribute to the lessons learnt that all visitors value so much on energypedia! In addition, we also received some constructive feedback on further improving our platform. We will take into consideration all the suggestions mentioned in this survey and will incooperate them whenever possible in our future strategies.

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Further User Surveys

The results of our user survey 2015 can be found here.

The results of our user survey 2019 can be found here.