FIDE Launches Survey To Investigate Chess Market

FIDE has launched a survey to research its potential chess market, evaluate the size of the global chess community and assess the value of its sponsorship offering. You can participate.

The survey has been created in cooperation with Nielsen Holdings, a world-leading company in the field of information, data and measurement.

In its press release, the World Chess Federation say it wants to know the chess community better in order to improve its decision-making: "We want to have more insight on what are the demands and wishes of those who are already active FIDE members, and those who may be attracted by our activities," it said in the statement. 

Besides typical chess related topics, the survey also asks for general demographics such as travel behavior, education and income.

The Nielsen survey is part of a bigger project for FIDE that attempts to find commercial sponsorship. Recently a cooperation agreement was signed with Coca-Cola, and also there a survey is involved.

For now, the deal with Coca-Cola is a small one since it is limited to two pilot projects: a rapid and blitz tournament this month in Riga (alongside the FIDE Grand Prix) and the Polish Team Championship at the end of August.

"We started working with [Coca-Cola's] European division," said FIDE's Director General Emil Sutovsky, "and got in touch with their top manager in their Eastern European and Baltic division in April. They were interested. I had several meetings in different countries, and we decided to start with something relatively small as a pilot project."

Over the past few months FIDE has conducted a broader Nielsen survey, called Sports DNA, in 11 countries among people outside the chess world.

"Coca-Cola is very much interested in the results, " said Sutovsky. "They would like to find out more about the popularity of chess, who are the people who are playing and following chess, their habits, interests, etc. to get clear picture if it could be a target group."

The second Nielsen survey is for chess players and fans, and was launched this week. It consists of 60 questions and has been designed to take between 10 and 20 minutes to complete. Chess.com has decided to support FIDE in this project, and therefore you'll find the survey embedded below. You can also fill it out here.

To compensate for your time and effort, FIDE gives all participants the option of entering a raffle for a two-hour online masterclass with Vladimir Kramnik. The 10 lucky winners will have the chance to interact with the former world champion and learn from this legendary player.

The survey can be filled out anonymously, but to participate in this raffle you'll need to provide your email address.