ONS Digital

P’nawn da ‘ Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s round-up.

So what’s been happening?

Last week was our first success of 2014 and arguably one of the best weeks since we formed the editorial team in digital publishing.  We had two stories out: Young People Living at Home and Gypsies and Irish Travellers. Young people was one of the most successful stories that we have ever released; receiving over 60 pieces of media coverage that ranged from prominent placement on the Guardian website and data blog through to extensive on-air coverage on Radio 1, even a Cuban news site ran the story! It was certainly a topic of conversation throughout the day, with social media chatter being consistent and discussions on other blogs. Web metrics were encouraging too, with an average view time of 176 seconds for the story and 111 seconds for the infographic. The story on Gypsies and Irish Travellers received a slower start to the day but gained momentum into the evening. It was well received on social channels with many charity groups pushing the story and graphic, recognising its contribution to a topic where accurate and impartial reporting can often be a rarity. By the end of the day it was in a prime location on both the Guardian and Daily Mail site and received nearly 400 hundred comments.

In other news..

Under the Improving Dissemination Programme, we are always looking at new ways to present our statistics. We have been working with our inflation team on some mythbusting ideas to help people understand how inflation affects them. We previously published an infographic on house prices and have now developed a prototype Inflation Summary, which aims to provide users with access to top level Inflation information from a single, static place on the ONS website. We have asked for some initial feedback from key users of these statistics and have received a positive response, complete with suggestions on how we can develop it further. We hope to share this wider in the next few weeks, so if you are interested to know how inflation impacts on you, watch this space,

On the weekend, some of the team attended UKGovcamp where they ended up leading a discussions about statistics and the ONS. There was a lot of interest in the session, so much so, that they had to move rooms to accommodate the number of people.

We also finalised details for a Wikiedithon, where experts in some of our high profile economic statistics will edit, and in some cases create pages on Wikipedia. We’ll let you know how it goes in the next update.

and finally….

We receive lots of feedback via social media on the infographics we produce, and a common complaint is the images being too large/long, too much copy, copy too small and cannot easily be formatted/optimised for republishing on other sites. Our social media team trialled breaking up the infographics into individual squares with each section having its own headline and being able to stand on its own. Sites often manually cut up the infographics themselves and embed them on their sites to focus on different parts of the story, but in this instance we could measure who used our individual already cut up images rather than manually cutting them up themselves because of the headlines we attached with each image. When the infographics are manually cut up the resolution is poor and it appears grainy and blurred, and the quality is often reduced. The images we produced also looked great on mobile. Here are a few examples of where the ‘mini infographics’ with headlines that we produced were used MailOnline(first image) and Eastern Daily Press used images for an ‘In Graphics:’ story. Something to look at for future infographics is to offer the full infographic for the whole story but also individual images with optimum resolution and quality, making it easy and cleaner for others to reuse when we can. We didn’t receive any negative comments on the format of the mini infographics, but as they were hosted on Facebook we did receive some comments that the channel was blocked on company networks and that people did not use Facebook,  but all useful feedback and something to consider going forward.