Among the skills managers learn at leadership workshops is giving feedback. Generally, employees crave feedback. Good feedback helps people grow — it challenges us, raises our awareness and rewards our work. Sometimes the feedback reminds us of our vulnerabilities. Offering feedback isn’t always easy. We get busy or distracted — often we just forget. Worst, we assume our feedback isn’t welcome.
Negative feedback, of course, is tricky. Objective mistakes — missed deadline, wrong identification, a typo — are pretty simple. Few people embrace subjective criticism — the photos are weak or the story isn’t well written, for example. Good leaders praise the shiny and offer tools to polish the dull.
We embrace feedback from readers. We like to hear what stories resonate and how they inspire your faith journey. We need to know when we have dull spots, and how we might polish our storytelling.
To encourage the feedback and in turn produce a more effective and impactful magazine, we conduct a biannual readership survey, in partnership with Faith Publishing, with whom we contract to produce the magazine. Printed surveys will be mailed in February to a random selection of our readers. If you receive the survey, please make the time to complete and return it.
This year, we’re also inviting all Catholic St. Louis readers to complete the same survey online. The questions are the same, and the digital interface will give us real-time results. To take the survey, please visit www.archstl.org/catholic-st-louis/survey
While leaders spend years developing their feedback skills, we’ve made this feedback easy for you. The survey should take about five minutes to complete and will give us insight worthy of decades of experience.
The results of the confidential survey help us better understand what readers like, and what doesn’t impact them as much as we hope. We use the results to develop our coverage plans. Help us make Catholic St. Louis magazine the best it can be for our readers.