Hello r/Asheville! A big thank you to everyone who completed the r/Asheville survey, all 105 of you. Seriously, we were kind of impressed by how many people did it, so thanks! In this post there are three items for your perusal:

• A brief overview of the survey results with a link to the specifics.
• A few suggestions that we’re going to try, based on the survey
• A moderator steps down

A Brief Overview of the Survey

Demographics

• Most of r/Asheville is between 26 and 40, about 43%
• Half have lived in Asheville more than 5 years
• More than 20% are from the Asheville area originally, with about 70% coming from somewhere in the Southeast
• About half live in either West or North Asheville
• About 25% work in computer-based industries like IT, programming, etc… Every other industry was 10% or less
• Almost half are college graduates, with over 20% having attended graduate school
• The single-married-long term relationships were about evenly split at 36%, 28%, and 31% respectively
• About 19% have at least one child

Meetups!

• Almost three quarters have never been to a meetup!
• The reasons for not attending meetups were relatively equal, with “others” mostly being combinations of the options given or “I didn’t know meetups happen” and “I forget the meetup is happening”

• Most people said that the best place for a meetup would be West Asheville (30%) or Downtown (45%) and preferred Saturdays

• Some general feedback about meetups:

1. Having games for people to play is cool

2. Ask attendees for suggestions for the location of the next meetup

3. Be more diligent about picking places that aren’t very loud and have enough seating for everyone (particularly to avoid having to move to a new location)

Weekly threads

• Respondents were generally in favor of the new “What’s Going On?” thread, and there was moderate interest in a Daily Discussion Thread
• A sample of suggested regular posts:
• More local outdoor photos
• "What's new/what's closed?"
• Maybe neighborhood threads? [not sure what this means, but we’re intrigued! Perhaps if this was you, you can expand on this idea?]
• Entrepreneurship/business idea sharing
• More uplifting news
• Meetup threads for non-reddit events, such as concerts and other local events.
• A list of free/low cost things to do that week
• More music stuff

See this link for the breakdown of each question.

Announcements

In the future, we will try to keep your meetup suggestions in mind when planning and during the meetups. We are also going to try something a little different and go ahead and plan the next three meetups. The first Saturday of the next three months, there will be a meetup. This is planned under a couple assumptions: if our planning is more consistent and people can plan ahead, maybe more people will come?

• Saturday October 3rd, at Odd’s Café on Haywood Rd
• Saturday November 7th, at Burial Beer
• Saturday December 5th, at Battery Park Book Exchange

Additionally, our last meetup was rained out, so we rescheduled the $10 drawing for the next meetup!

Hopefully this provides times and neighborhoods that are amenable and a variety of types of locations. Feedback is always welcome!

We are also going to begin a daily discussion thread twice a week. In this thread, feel free to discuss whatever – Asheville related or not. We’ll see how it goes for about a month, and if it isn’t helpful or used often, then we’ll shut it down.

And lastly, our fearless moderator funked_up has decided to step down from his post. He was the purveyor of many r/Asheville stickers and created a lot of the content and formatting on the sub. Thank you for your years of service!

And thank you again to everyone who completed the survey, and feel free to leave any comments or feedback below!