ONS Digital

Prynhawn da / Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s digital round-up on a very fine St Patrick’s day

So what’s been happening?

It was a fairly busy week, with the release of ‘Do Smoking Rates Vary Between More and Less Advantaged Areas’ a short story, to support ‘No Smoking Day’ and an infographic to help explain the Inequality in Healthy Life Expectancy by area deprivation. Both of these were well-received, with comments about the simplicity of the explanations and formats used. We also produced a package of materials, which included an article and infographic highlighting some of the many household items that help make up the Consumer Prices Index basket of goods. This is just one area we are working on with our inflation team, to bust the myths around the measures of inflation, so that a wider audience can understand the relevance and impact to them.

In other news..

We are continuing discussions with GDS to discuss the transition of the release calendar function from the Publication Hub to the GOV.UK website. As part of this work we are also reviewing the roles and responsibilities within the release scheduling processes in the organisation with a view to making it simpler and easier to manage.

Our work to review our editorial standards is continuing and has included some articles for our internal audience on house-style issues which have had a positive response.

Following on from the success of the Factoids and Mind the Gap features, our social media team are looking into what other opportunities exist to promote our statistics in real time, as opposed to just when new statistics are released.

and finally…

Under the Improving Dissemination Programme, Digital Publishing aims to to build closer relationships with third-parties who’ll add value to our statistics and help us reach the wider public. We have been working with a number of organisations such as Wikipedia and OCSI over the last year to help us understand more about what our users want and ensure we provide user driven content. We have been joined by a statistical expert to help drive forward this ‘digital outreach’ work and over the next 6 months they will focus on identifying opportunities for online engagement and delivering activity that helps our audiences as well as develop the way ONS uses the web.