GLAM/Newsletter/August 2012/Contents/From the team
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Results of the This Month in GLAM survey (part 1)
At the beginning of July, I announced the first This Month in GLAM survey. Thanks to all that filled it in; we had 16 responses - a regrettably small number but it still gives an interesting insight to what channels people receive the newsletter through and what's good and lots of potential ideas for the future of the newsletter. In this month's edition, I will look at answers to the first few questions on the survey.
Subscription
Do you subscribe to This Month in GLAM
The majority of those filling in the newsletter did subscribe to this newsletter. The fact that so many of those filling in the survey did not probably has less to do with readers of the newsletter not subscribing than the survey being filled in by people who do not read the newsletter. Hopefully this has changed now
It's difficult to get accurate reader statistics for the newsletter due to it being spread between so many channels. It is delivered to several hundred people but most of those are via mailing lists; it would be interesting to see how many people read the newsletter.
How did you find out about the newsletter?
If readership of the newsletter is to be increased, it must be publicised in different places. The second question tried to explore where people found out about the newsletter (with a view to working on improving on the areas which lack) by offering. The graph (see right) cites "on-wiki" as the most common method of discovering. This is quite an ambiguous option but it means that whatever we're doing there, we seem to be doing it well.
How do you subscribe to the newsletter?
Putting the "I don't" results to one side, on their user talk page and via a mailing list are the two biggest results here. The newsletter can be delivered to user talk pages by bot - on any Wikimedia wiki (or similar). Around 100 people subscribe using this method. A links-only version of the newsletter is sent to three different mailing lists: cultural-partners-l, GLAM-l and WikimediaAnnounce-l (the most-subscribed-to of the 3).
I have no solid statistics as to click-through data for articles (toolserver tools which count page-views, for instance, don't work on the Outreach Wiki where This Month in GLAM is hosted - perhaps this could be a task for someone more literate in coding that I). A tool such as this could provide a much broader insight into what subscription methods people read the newsletter through than a survey could.