ONS Digital

Prynhawn da/Good afternoon

Due to the bank holiday weekend, this edition of Weeknotes is brought to you a little later that usual.

So what’s been happening here in Digital Publishing Division over the last week?

It was a good week for us on the digital editorial front, with a large amount of economic content being published alongside the Second Estimate of GDP. We had two short stories and a glossary of economic terms, complimenting the Design team’s shiny new interactive product called ‘How ONS statistics explain the UK economy’, based on the infographic released in the Spring, but with more detail and containing up-to-date economic data.

On Wednesday, a few of us travelled to Titchfield, one of our other sites to hold our second Digital Drop-in Day. After a a bumpy start, mainly down to the non-existent room and the usual issues with accessing external websites, we had a steady flow of people keen to learn more about digital channels and us as a team. We managed to have some really productive discussions and were able to gauge people’s level of digital knowledge, with some not even knowing what twitter and facebook looked like. We also got some useful feedback on us as a division as some felt that we were not very visible or accessible. This is something we are keen to address quickly to ensure all staff have more opportunities to communicate with us directly.

Other news
We published a short story on deprivation in main seaside towns, which got excellent (and unanticipated) levels of media attention. All of this coverage is being used to inform and evaluate our performance, including influencing new success measures that apply to the team’s work.

Following user feedback on the Key Economic Time Series page which we launched last month, we have made some improvements. These include:

• Addition of key terminology.
• Simplification of the GDP section,
• Addition of column headings due to confusion over the meaning of Series ID.
• Addition of a units column to give the data more meaning.

We launched an update to the social media policy for employees which is in line with the Civil Service Employee Policy. The policy promotes the message #thinkbeforeyoupost and addresses a number of important points, including discussing work and the organisation on personal social media channels. We are holding presentations for staff next month to explain the policy in more detail along with how ONS is using social media channels to better engage with its users.