If you play any role in children’s media in Canada, there’s an ongoing research project that really wants to hear from you.

Launched last week, the Canadian Children’s Media Industry Survey is part of an upcoming whitepaper commissioned by the Shaw Rocket Fund back in December. The whitepaper, now scheduled to be released in June, is meant to inform policymakers and regulators so that they can create a path forward for the future of Canadian children’s media—which has seen funding sources dry up amid a shifting media landscape.

Shaw Rocket Fund CEO and president Agnes Augustin tells Kidscreen that the report should help fill a crucial gap in industry data: the absence of comprehensive research that’s specific to the children’s media ecosystem. “There are whitepapers that address certain issues, but [not] something of this nature that looks at children’s behavior and where the media is today,” she says. 

Leading the effort is Kim Wilson, director of Toronto-based consultancy OneFish TwoFish, who’s spent nearly 25 years in the kids industry herself. Wilson, who has nicknamed the research effort “Project Sunbeam” (to shine a light forward for the kids community), agrees that the survey’s exhaustive approach to regional kids industry data is pretty unique. A self-proclaimed research geek, Wilson says she was inspired by the work of scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. “She developed this idea of intersectionality [relating to] race and gender. But that logic kind of applies here in terms of not just looking at things in silos but getting a holistic picture.”

Wilson and Augustin say there’s no magic number in terms of how many responses they want, but they hope to receive a variety of voices—covering not just every province, but also workers and executives at every level of the industry. To that end, the survey is open to those from an array of sectors: production, animation, broadcasting, gaming, social media, distribution and emerging tech. “There’s power in numbers,” Wilson adds. “If 50 people say something, that’s interesting. But if we get a finding that’s backed by 1,000 respondents, it becomes really hard for a funder or a policymaker to ignore it.”

The survey is investigating specifics like the state of the Quebec/Francophone market, whether Canadian producers are looking more into international co-pros due to the contraction of the US kids market, discoverability for Canadian children’s content and what funding sources are most relied upon in the country.

The survey is designed to be anonymous and has several open-ended questions to ensure the survey doesn’t miss any critical insights. One of the notable questions in the survey asks whether traditional age categories (preschoolers, six to 12s, tweens) are still relevant as content has shifted to streaming and digital.

“It really was about how those age ranges were built from a broadcaster scheduling perspective,” Augustin says. “Online, there’s a whole different way of looking at age, so it’s a really important question for our industry to answer. What does it mean to target a child today with your content? So that’s definitely one of the questions we had a lot of conversations around.”

The survey is open until April 8. Since it’s an in-depth questionnaire, and can take anywhere from 25 to 45 minutes to complete, it has a handy continue-where-you-left-off feature to allow busy professionals to save their progress and complete it in parts. The English-language survey is available here and the French version is available here.

“This research that we’re doing in this paper is really critical right now,” Augustin says. “This whitepaper is going to be available for anyone that needs it. And because of the way our industry is today and the way we’re headed, the time is now. We need as many voices as we can get to help us move forward and be able to not just strengthen but rebuild our kids industry in Canada.”

(Image courtesy of Alesia Kozik/Pexels)