Webmaster blog

We have made some changes to our website front page, which we hope will make it even more relevant to our many visitors.

We want the front page of our website to demonstrate our current work more effectively and to make it easier for you to find things of interest to you.

Our front page is important as it’s the first point of entry for most visitors to the Citizenship Foundation. Is unlikely we will be able to do substantial work to the rest of the website any time soon, but we are working hard to build strong links across the site and to write more engaging content.

Do tell us what you think. Your feedback is important as it will help us develop a front page that is right for our visitors.

I was recently asked if I would share the guidelines that I produced to support our staff in communicating online.

They cover blogging and social media, law and writing and editing content.

They are not policies as such; and please bear in mind they were written for a specific internal audience. But if they could be of use to you do feel free to adapt them (they’re licenced under Creative Commons BY-SA).

I would also be very interested to hear your feedback on them.

Have you tried contacting us in the past? If so, was it a good experience?

We’re conducting a short survey into how accessible we are as an organisation: can you find contact details easily, do we respond in a reasonable time, is our response adequate, et cetera.

We should be very grateful if you would take a few minutes to tell us what you think. The survey will be up for four weeks and then we’ll review it and let you know what our next move is, so keep your eyes peeled on this blog.

We are trying to get better at engaging with people online, in order to offer our audience the best and most appropriate information and support that we can.

Like many organisations now, we are aware that our website is not where most people will be talking about us or our line of work. Therefore we need to be listening and engaging constructively with online activity.

This post is really a note to myself of the listening techniques I employ, but as it might be useful to others it seemed a good idea to publish it here.

What I look for

I used to search for a number of keywords covering the breadth of the organisation, but have now slimmed it down to a very specific few:

• “citizenship foundation”
• “citizenship teaching”
• “citizenship education”
• “digital engagement”
• “digital inclusion” OR “digital exclusion”

Gathering

• I subscribe to Google Alerts for each of the search terms above.
• I set up searches in Addictomatic.
• I aggregate feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) in a Yahoo! Pipe, which in turn filters out duplicates, filters out items generated from our own website, appends the name of the source, sorts the items into reverse date order and publishes the result as a new feed.
  Current feed sources:
  • Google news search for “citizenship foundation”
  • Google blogs search for “citizenship foundation”
  • Yahoo! Search for “citizenship foundation”
  • Twitter search for ”citizenship foundation”
  • Twitter search for “@citizenship”
• RSS delivers only the latest items, and I wanted an easy way to archive them. So I now pull the Yahoo! Pipe feed into Tumblr as links with summaries, so I have a history of where we’re being talked about. This isn’t perfect because not all the feeds seem to be behaving themselves, but it’s a start.
• I use Google Reader to skim through the full texts of the latest feed items and other related news.

Of course the usefulness of this might diminish a little when more newspapers put their content behind paywalls (see Murdoch to limit Google access), but it should remain possible to see at least a headline.

Responding

I won’t go into depth about how I respond to what I ‘hear’, but elsewhere I published a flowchart on how to ‘Manage your online reputation‘ (external link), based heavily on one produced by the US Air Force. You might find it useful.

I’m looking for a meticulous editor to spend two days editing existing web pages in line with a given style guide.

Ideally you should be based in Birmingham (UK) so I can work closely with you and assist with inevitable technical issues.

The work needs to be completed within the next two weeks.

If you are interested please email us with a CV or examples of work.

According to new research, most young people aged 14-25 would be likely to vote in an election and would be more likely to if they could do so online. However, they don’t see social networking as particularly useful for furthering a cause, favouring instead an email to their Member of Parliament.

A recent YouGov poll for the Citizenship Foundation interviewed almost 4,000 14-25 year-olds about their attitudes to political participation, politicians and power in the United Kingdom.

• The majority of respondents said they would be likely to vote, with 59 per cent seeing voting as the most useful way of participating in local or national politics.
• 32 per cent said they were knowledgeable about “the way that local and national government works”; of those, 71 per cent said the internet was a source of their news.
• 85 per cent had never joined a campaigning group in their local community (fairly consistent across the age ranges), and 50 per cent thought doing so would make no difference to the issues the tackle (also fairly consistent).
• 51 per cent had never joined a campaigning group on a social networking site, but 42 per cent had; however 65 per cent thought doing so would make no difference.
• 54 per cent said they would be more likely to vote if they could do so online. Interestingly, 78 per cent said they had never contacted a TV or radio show (by phone, text or email) to express their views.
• Email was seen as the most effective tool for making a political difference online. This doubles at the top end of the age bracket. Twitter scores very low and only increases fractionally with older respondents; although interestingly there is a significant spike among 16 year-olds (almost treble the score of younger age groups).

Further information

The research was commissioned to mark the Citizenship Foundation’s 20th year.

• Press releases
• Download the survey results summary (pdf)
• Download the full survey results (pdf)

Extra!

I’ve just become aware of a book (yes, a book) of Twitter celebrities. If there was a charity edition, who would you like to see in it and why?

I’ll start off with @RealHughJackman, for donating $100,000 to charity via Twitter.

Who else?

Update (Dec 2010)

No-one responded last year, so I’m recycling this post for 2010.