By Yvonne Tevis, Chief of Staff, Information Technology Services, UC Office of the President. Thanks to everyone who completed the survey! Seventy-six people responded – out of a subscriber list of 1280. Here is a summary, along with our takeaways.
Favorite type of post
The favorite type of article by far was the feature story (55.3%). It won out over announcements (23.7%), spotlight interviews of IT staff (18.4%), or videos (2.6%).
Finding out about the blog
The top categories were email from UCOP (28.9%), friend/colleague (23.7%), Slack and UCCSC (17.1%). Guess word of mouth still works!
Frequency of reading the blog
Once a week (32%) or once a month (30.7%); then two to three times a month (28%). Twice a week is not happening (9.3%).
Written responses
Now to the fun part: We got thirty-two suggestions for article topics. They ranged from “I have never read the blog,” to “Any tech happening that’s tied to research,” to “I like hearing about homegrown software and campus developers.”
In response to the question – “How can the UC IT Blog improve?” – we got twenty-seven ideas. They ranged from “be.real.” to “more announcements” to “Suggest low impact ways that we can share useful information and save others lots of time.” One kind person wrote, “Excellent work. Great articles and presentations. Congrats to the UC IT Blog Team!”
But that’s the thing – the “team” is actually everyone who reads the blog and contributes. The blog should represent the voice of UC IT, and we would love it if most articles were written by location staff. So… please do send story ideas for us to pursue, drafts you’ve written, or links to articles we can repost.
Our next steps
What have we learned from the survey? We’re going to see how we can distribute articles less frequently – maybe only once a week but with a couple of stories to read. We’ll run fewer spotlight interviews and focus more on feature articles. And for the person who wrote, “Improve the look of the email so it looks more enticing. The text version is pretty blando” – thanks, we’re going to try!