Elf Survey Results Revealed
A North Pole survey on visiting elves, drawing hundreds of thousands of responses, found that 54% of respondents were dissatisfied with their visiting elf’s performance, and 74% said they were likely to abandon the tradition entirely. Common complaints included late arrivals, inactivity, inappropriate behavior, and threats made to children.
In response, the North Pole plans to launch a Visiting Elves feature on SantaUpdate.com, offering elf registration, certification, and reporting tools. The Department of Elf Resources will oversee the program and continue surveying participants to measure improvement over time.
Last December the North Pole commissioned a survey for what we call The Elf Project. It is an exploration of Visiting Elves and the phenomenon of the Elf on the Shelf, as it is popularly called.
In recent years the North Pole has been besieged with requests and complaints about visiting elves.
North Pole News has communicated on several occasions that not much was known about who visiting elves are because Santa has had a long standing order that elves are not authorized by him or anyone else at the North Pole to visit homes.
Our exploration into this topic has uncovered confusion and frustration for Santa, for parents, for believers and for real elves who get mistaken for a visiting elf.
After more than six months of open survey we can share more of what people think of the idea of visiting elves and what Santa and his staff at the North Pole plan to do about it.
The survey, with hundreds of thousands of responses since launched, reveals that 54% of respondents are dissatisfied with the performance of elves visiting their homes.
Of those who report satisfaction with their visiting elves the dissatisfaction rate of North Pole support for visiting elf activity is very high at more than 69%. This result should not be a surprise. At present, there is not and never has there ever been any official acknowledgement of a visiting elf program by Santa or anyone else at the North Pole.
How can there be any satisfaction or real dissatisfaction for a support program that never exists?
A whopping 74% of all respondents, both the satisfied and dissatisfied, say they are likely to drop the tradition of visiting elves because the tradition is not bringing positive value to the Christmas experience in the home and family.
The survey reveals issues with late arriving elves, elves that show up but don’t do anything, elves that engage in inappropriate behaviors, use of bad language and repeated threats of projecting less-than-flattering information to Santa about believers in the home.
For months Santa’s Executive Council has considered the many findings of the survey and has explored possible solutions that will allow the tradition of visiting elves to continue while bringing them to the oversight of the Department of Elf Resources at the North Pole.
In the coming days SantaUpdate.com will launch a Visiting Elves feature, free for all site users. The feature will offer Elf Registration, Certification to standards of the Elf Code and the Elf Oath, and abilities to locate and report an elf.
For North Pole Club members, optional Elf Services will be offered that will not only bring the visiting elf in the home to standards but will broaden their activities to improve the in-home Elf Experience.
All of these new additions will require added efforts of the Department of Elf Resources, of believers and of parents in order for it to be successful. It is hoped that a year from now we will be able to report improvements in those areas survey respondents feel are presently deficient.
The Department of Elf Resouces will continue to survey believers around the world to gauge the effectiveness of these new procedures and offerings and to generate additional ideas to improve the Visiting Elf experience for everyone.
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Thank you, Elf Ernest! Christmas is not a traditional celebration in my country, so we don’t have the Visiting Elf or the Elf on the Shelf. Are these two different? Do we refer to an elf who isn’t behaving well for Santa as an “elf”? I hope those elves can become a nicer elf. 🎅🧑🎄🙌✨