ONS Digital

Prynhawn Da / Good Afternoon and welcome to this week’s round-up of activities from Digital Publishing, the last one for this financial year.

So what’s been happening?

We had a busy week on social media with the Census release on how living arrangements and marital status have changed in England and Wales since 2001.The 5 interesting facts proved popular, as did the #allthesingleladies, signposting people to an interactive map on how many single people lived in their area. This release sparked some debate about whether this was an appropriate topic for ONS to cover, but generally it was well received, gaining both national and local media coverage.

Our design team also produced an infographic on Sexual Identity in the UK which was timely, due to the first same-sex marriages taking place that weekend and so proactively pushed the infographic out to interested parties. This is not something we have tended to do with our releases, but from the positive response we received on twitter and other media agencies, linking our data to the current news agenda, where appropriate, is something we will consider in future.

In other news

Our social media team met with LinkedIn, the business orientated social networking service, to discuss how they could help support a HR recruitment campaign, specifically focusing on people with IT expertise. The aim is to take a more targeted approach and produce resources which are more engaging for the careers section. Watch this space for further details

We met with GDS to discuss producing a set of editorial standards for statistical publishing. This follows on from the work we have been doing to review our own in-house editorial standards and the discussions on replacing the release calendar function on the publication hub,

Some of the team took a visit to the British Library to experience their Beautiful Science exhibition and how communicating data has changed over the centuries, while others got hands-on user experience learning by attending the UK Fundamentals webcredible training course.

Due to the considerable interest received in our workshops on Jaws and Dragon, we have developed a script for an accessibility video which we plan to film later this month for staff training. 

and finally…,

Our publishing and policy team are developing a campaign to help improve the quality and findability of content on the ONS website. This campaign will cover a range of topics, including the use of Plain English and the new metadata standards launched last year and will be communicated to staff over the next few months.