Our website was established in 2000 and is one of our key assets.
We decided in 2011 to move our site onto more interactive technology and we migrated the existing content into WordPress between May and November 2012. This gave us the opportunity to introduce a live blog and other features, but it means that we are constrained by some of the characteristics of the technology. Furthermore WordPress is a dynamic environment and we cannot assume that all its existing features will continue to operate as they do now.
Income and expenditure
We spent £1,649.66 directly on the website, (not including Internet access) of which about £1150 was development costs. The site generated £1,293.37 in advertising revenue.
Design
The Editorial Board we appointed in June drew up a design brief to remedy what they considered to be the weaknesses of the website. I have no quarrel with the aims of the brief, but I doubt whether some of them can be realised easily or at all with the resources we have available. The design was finalised in July 2013 and given to Remeike Forbes and implemented in October by means of a new WordPress Theme which he designed – along with our wonderful new logo.
The numbers below come either from the Jetpack statistics tool or from Google Analytics. They are both imperfect, but this is the best information we have. We don’t have data from either before January 2012.
Jetpack’s report on 2013
Website activity
- 2013: 375,511 page views, 158,180 Unique Visitors, 1.67 Pages per Visit, Average Visit Duration 00:02:01, Bounce Rate 73.5%.
- 2012: 338,415 page views 131,303 Unique Visitors, 1.86 Pages per Visit, Average Visit Duration 00:01:53, Bounce Rate 70.65%
While these numbers look impressive 168,948 of visits were for less than 10 seconds. Statistics for the website now are not comparable with earlier years. The WordPress site went live in June 2012 but was not fully populated until November 2012, so the 2012 figures include some use of the old site.
Our Google page rank of 4/10 for sochealth.co.uk (5 last year). I’m not clear why our rank has dropped, though I was always surprised that we ever rated as high as 5. Looking at similar organisations:
- Your Britain and the main Labour Party site are rated 6
- Fabian Society 5
- Compass 5
- Diary of a Benefit Scrounger 5
- LGBT Labour 4
- NHS for Sale 4
- NHS Networks blog 4
- NHS Support Federation 4
- A Better NHS 3
- Debbie Abrahams site 3
- National Health Action Party 0
We should try to get the Bounce Rate down and the visit duration up – that is to get more people to visit pages other than the one they arrived at.
Social Media
Our Facebook page now has 1757 (1488 last year) fans. However changes to the operation of Facebook has made this much less significant. Facebook does little to encourage voluntary on-line organisation. While a couple of years ago there was quite a lot of activity on our FB page, and Debbie Caine managed to build 100,000 followers for her online campaign “I bet I can find 1,000,00 people who don’t want David Cameron as our PM”. Now no more than 50 people see comments on our FB page. “I bet..” is down to 3570 members.
I think we should maintain a presence on Facebook. It’s still the third most popular site in the UK. It’s fed from our Twitter stream. But it isn’t worth paying much attention to because it doesn’t give us as an organisation much opportunity to make our points. The only way it works is for individual members.
Our Twitter feed now has 2845 (1365 last year) followers, and we have made 16578 tweets. Mostly they come from me, but Shibley makes regular contributions and Brian and Jos tweet for us occasionally. Tweeting takes some getting used to. It’s very lively and dynamic. I know I annoyed some members with some of my early tweets, and I have become more careful. Twitter offers us much more promising opportunities than Facebook. It’s possible to engage in useful debate with policy makers and to develop our reputation positively. It’s the 11th most popular site in the UK. But it takes a lot of work. I guess I spend about an hour a day on Twitter most days. It is very useful at big conferences, where the organisers generally display a live stream of tweets related to the event.
External Sites
We have a small presence on YouTube, where there are 9 videos which feature on our website. Just as with Facebook, YouTube is trying to develop itself as a social media site for individuals, which doesn’t particularly suit our needs as an organisation. We could do more with this – including possibly moving our videos to a site which suits us better.
We have quite a substantial presence on Slideshare where there are 146 Powerpoint presentations from our conferences. It received 20149 views in 2013, among the top 2% on the site.
We also have a presence on Issuu where there are 65 PDF files, some from our conferences, but mostly back issues of Socialism and Health.
Website content
We now have 915 Pages (mostly migrated from our old site), 679 Posts and 2,272 Comments, and we’ve had 15,703 spam comments – we pay for protection against these.
Shibley Rahman must be congratulated for his Stakhanovite efforts on the website. He has posted 211 articles during the year, on a wide variety of subjects, which have attracted many readers. We have been successful in attracting contributions from outside the Association. Unsolicited contributions have appeared from Ivan Lewis MP, Dr Steve Bolsin, the whistleblower in the Bristol Royal Infirmary case (from Australia). We have persuaded some excellent writers to produce original material for us, such as Martin Routledge,and Stephanie Petrie. We had our first official post from NHS England – Vicki Hallam. I have posted or reposted some excellent material from Prof Walter Holland, Sue Marsh, Andy Burnham, Kaliya Franklin, Adrian Davis, Mark Carroll, Sanchia Alasia and Nick Krachler. But we need to try harder to persuade our members to contribute.
Website traffic
The vast bulk of visits come from search engines:
| Referrer | Views | |
|---|---|---|
 Search Engines |
171,529 | |
 Twitter |
25,331 | |
 Facebook |
9,179 | |
 en.wikipedia.org |
7,497 | |
 WordPress Dashboard |
4,655 |
Search Terms (this is clearly only a partial list):
| Search | Views |
|---|---|
| the black report | 6,570 |
| black report | 2,544 |
| black report 1980 | 1,972 |
| the black report 1980 | 1,784 |
| beveridge report | 1,527 |
| health and social care 2013 | 1,167 |
| roller coaster | 808 |
| marilyn monroe | 800 |
| acheson report | 744 |
| socialist health association | 702 |
| acheson report 1998 | 575 |
| griffiths report | 458 |
| the black report summary | 454 |
| rollercoaster | 434 |
| black report summary | 418 |
| the black report 1980 summary | 415 |
| the beveridge report | 398 |
| obesity | 391 |
| inverse care law | 374 |
| the acheson report | 345 |
| inequalities in health the black report | 252 |
| griffiths report 1983 | 239 |
| the black report inequalities in health | 229 |
| black report 1980 summary | 221 |
| aneurin bevan | 216 |
| the black report 1980 pdf | 198 |
| beveridge report full text | 187 |
| drugs | 187 |
| what is the black report | 177 |
| the acheson report 1998 | 173 |
| health inequalities in the uk | 164 |
| target | 159 |
| the acheson report 1998 summary | 142 |
| the griffiths report | 138 |
| national insurance act 1911 | 132 |
| saw palmetto | 129 |
| the black report 1980 inequalities in health | 124 |
| acheson report summary | 123 |
| aneurin bevan nhs | 120 |
| artefact explanation | 118 |
| the inverse care law | 110 |
| the black report pdf | 110 |
| artefact explanation of health inequalities | 106 |
| ely hospital | 106 |
| patient | 104 |
| tackling health inequalities | 101 |
| griffith report | 100 |