LGBT marketing company launches national survey

By Jen Colletta
PGN Staff Writer
© 2008 Philadelphia Gay News

Community Marketing, Inc., a national LGBT-focused marketing company, will launch its second LGBT Consumer Index Survey today to evaluate the basic fabric of the nation’s sexual-minority community.

The survey will be open to all LGBT-identified Americans until Sept. 14 at www.lgbtsurvey.com or through PGN’s Web site, www.epgn.com.

More than 26,000 people responded to last year’s survey, which collected basic demographic information, as well as posed questions about the respondents’ careers, personal lives and interests.

The survey is divided into questions for lesbians and those for gay men.

According to the 2007 survey, 64.5 percent of lesbian respondents and 46.3 percent of gay males were in relationships and living with their partners, and 20 percent of lesbian couples and 5 percent of gay male couples had children under the age of 18 living with them.

Lesbian couples were also more likely than gay males to own a single-family home, while gay men were more likely to rent apartments.

About 50 percent of lesbians owned cats and 58.5 percent owned dogs, while only 28.4 percent of gay men were cat owners and 37.6 were dog owners.

In addition to this information, Jerry McHugh, senior research director at CMI, said the survey also collects data about what LGBT people expect from workplace environments, which he said can show employers how to better meet employees’ needs.

“Things like employment practices come up very strongly in the survey, so it drives companies to improve the way they treat their employees based on gender identification and sexual orientation,” McHugh said.

McHugh said the breadth of the survey allows for valuable and rarely delineated information about the lives of LGBT people, which he said can assist companies from all industries in providing specific outreach to the community.

“The survey is about education, so the primary companies that tend to look at this information are large corporations looking at ways to better interact with the gay community and better ways to address this particular community,” he said.

Results of the survey will be published in the 2008 LGBT Consumer Index Study, which will be released Dec. 31 and is available for pre-order at www.gayconsumerindex.com.

Jen Colletta can be reached at jen@epgn.com.