Do you have the feeling that the last team meeting or dinner with friends wouldn’t have taken place if you hadn’t taken the initiative? If that’s the case, then you’re probably one of the initiators who organizes more than half of their personal and business meetings without any help. The portion of these initiators among Internet users is 22%, which is about the same size as the portion of “loners” who never take care of these tasks. Additionally, 55% of Internet users may organize some of their meetings, but for the most part, they’re “herd people” who allow themselves to be herded by other people. These are just some of the results of a recent survey that was conducted on behalf of Doodle*.
Despite what you may think, people with higher educations, income, and job positions are more likely to be initiators. These people are normally busier than others and have more appointments per week and more contacts that they manage. Also, when they get annoyed by scheduling, they use Doodle to get quick and easy help because the portion of initiators among Doodle users is almost twice as big as the portion of initiators among Internet users**.
Initiators are:
- People with higher education and income
- Mostly managers, office workers, and freelancers
- Not really determined by age or gender
Initiators are twice as likely to agree with the following statements:
- I know a lot of people
- I like to connect people
- I like to organize things for the group
- People act on what I say
Initiators use:
- Private social networks more often (social media)
- Business social networks much more often
- Sites about new tools and technology more often
Initiators attend more group events:
- 50% have 3 or more group events per week (compared to 25% of non-initiators)
- Less than 10% of initiators have fewer than one meeting per week
“Loners” don’t organize any events by themselves:
- They make up 23% of Internet users and 3% of Doodle users
- 73% of them have less than one group event per week
- Many of them “don’t like to organize” (72%) and “don’t know a lot of people” (61%)
Both initiators and other respondents indicated a clear list of things that are annoying when organizing events for others. 93% are annoyed by at least one of the situations below, and chasing people who aren’t answering is the clear winner.
Business meetings are the most frequent group events that the respondents attend, followed by volunteering events and dinner appointments. The initiators don’t favor a particular event type, but they just have more of each.
*Toluna Group Ltd. on behalf of Doodle (June 2012): International survey among Internet users by means of online panels in the US, the UK, Germany, France, and Switzerland (2,050 respondents)
**On-site surveys of Doodle users (May 2012 – 777 respondents and June 2012 – 501 respondents)
