if your law firm (or any of its partners) hosts a blog, then once you have published your survey report, you should publish at least one post about the findings. As an example, Morrison & Foerster fielded a survey in May of 2020 about the impact of Covid19; they announced the survey on their blog with a brief description plus a link to the full report.

You will likely reach more people if you break your principal findings into a series of blog posts. The language in the report serves as the starting point for the posts. Each post should cross-reference the other posts with a clickable link. You can insert images in your post, either with screenshots from your report (less desirable because less clear) or the plots themselves that have been saved in .png or .jpg format. Always include a link to the survey report itself and a contact name and email (coded to prevent scraping). Blog posts generate more reach if the authors sprinkles in terms that search engines pick up, or more generally write titles and contents with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind.

When you write the blog post, you can add more interpretations or speculations as there are no content limitations (unlike a report designed and sized to be printed). You can add more references, such as citations to research in the area of law or relevant court decisions. Blogging also encourages a more relaxed style than the formal prose expected in a fancy report.

Software can track how many people open each blog post, such as Google Analytics or Goatcounter. That software also tells you more about readers, including the country they ae associated with, the time they spent on the blog, how they navigated it, and what referral site pointed them to your opus.

If you’re blog allows readers to leave comment on posts (Disqus offers that function as do the many blogging platforms, including WordPress), you may hear from particularly engaged readers. After all, they went through the trouble to search the Internet, spot the link to your blog post, read the post, and took the time to write something. On the less positive side, you must vigilantly curate undesirable comments.

As long as you are creating posts for your blog, or if you do not maintain a blog, you could publish the same material on LinkedIn groups. Not to be too self-serving, but you might consider my group, Law Department Management. You can tweet and figure out which hashtags best represent your topic. Terseness is, of course, a prerequisite, so you should use a URL shortener such as Bitly. By picking the most targeted hashtags, you will be directly reaching people who care about the domain of your survey topic.

As the series unfolds, opportunities will arise for turning the compiled posts into an article. Repurposing the report or blog text allows you to polish, reorganize, and bolster your conclusions.

In the report, you might highlight the upcoming blog posts, and provide a link to the blog. Explain the opportunity for readers to comment and to read additional information about the findings. In other words, the static report becomes a living, breathing blog presences that can enlarge and deepen what you do with your blog posts. Your firm’s outreach and learning continue at whatever pace the bloggers and your readers follow.

What you would like to happen is that your post series or individual components go viral. A news source picks it up and writes more about it or another blogger refers to it. Perhaps an article references your blog posts and drives up traffic. All of this is in service of publicity and marketing the data created by your law firm’s survey.