Insight 3 from Research Focus - smart decisions on current awareness require data
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

In the final insight from Jinfo's Research Focus, "Content and technology for current awareness", Robin Neidorf asks whether you're collecting data to measure the effectiveness of your current awareness efforts, and whether you're reviewing your approach and goals accordingly.

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An information team cannot provide current awareness services effectively without capture and analysis of data. Too many teams gather no data, leaving them to make guesses about users, access, volume, satisfaction - any of the basics about the service.

Granted, it's difficult to know what kind of data to gather. Few organisations articulate a clear purpose for the provision of current awareness services, and the uses to which these services are put are diverse and often ephemeral.

If this sounds like your environment, you may feel that the capture of meaningful data is a pipe dream. Whilst talking with customers during the Research Focus, "Content and technology for current awareness", I was frankly shocked at how often I heard, "We don't have any data; we just don't have a way to capture it".

But the provision of any service requires you to understand basic characteristics of its customers and how they are using it. 

You can collect data... when you use the right tools

Here are some of the datapoints that any information service can and should be collecting about a newsletter-based current awareness delivery system:

• Number of subscribers
• Departments/job titles of subscribers
• Number and pattern of unsubscribe requests
• Number and pattern of new subscribe requests
• Estimated open rate
• Estimated forward rate
• Viewing device (e.g. desktop, mobile device)
• Average number of newsletters subscriptions per user
• Most common sources for items in newsletter
• Average number of items per newsletter
• Staff time required per newsletter
• Staff time required to manage mailing list.

All but the last four of these datapoints are standard data automatically captured and reported by common newsletter mailing systems. Although these systems are most commonly used for marketing purposes, they are equally valuable for internal communications.

You can't get this kind of data if you are maintaining a mailing list in Outlook and sending your newsletters as emails - and this is often the barrier to better data-capture: using the wrong tool for the job.

What's the benefit? With this kind of basic data:

• You can better identify core customer groups and then work with them to better understand their needs
  
  
• You can determine the effectiveness of your efforts to make visible the services of your information centre
  
  
• You can better target training to different parts of the business, by job title, department, geography, etc.
  
  
• You gain insight into the working patterns of your audience - whether they scan headlines from their phones on the way to work, or study updates over lunch.

Jinfo suggests: make it happen, for smarter decisions

No matter how simple your approach to providing current awareness, you can capture some data to help you improve, streamline or even decide to end the service.

As a minimum, track staff time for any tasks relating to the provision of current awareness services. Many information centres are floored by the actual cost when they see how much of their resource is going into these services.

Consider the plethora of platforms and tools now available to support better management, distribution and reporting of current awareness services. These developments have changed the marketplace, and your organisation relies on you to make informed recommendations about how well they are applicable to your world.

What you do with this data depends on your overall goals. But with improved data, all goals are more likely to be within reach.

Support from Jinfo: leverage our research and experience

Make progress on gathering, enhancing and analysing data about current awareness provision with the content in the recent Research Focus, "Content and technology for current awareness".

Jinfo's Consulting can also help - our evaluation of current awareness helps you maximise your current tools and processes so that you have data-based insight to work with. You'll also get recommendations on which data to focus on, depending on your organisational goals, and creative ways to gather it.

These items from the Research Focus underscore the importance - and availability - of data for smart decisions on current awareness:

• The slow shift of current awareness to mobile devices
• Is current awareness out of date?
• Tags, topics & more - the power of subscription in intranet
• Establishing a new current awareness service - challenges and opportunities
• Webinar recording (available to all Jinfo Subscribers): The state of the industry for content platforms
• Webinar recording (available to all Jinfo Subscribers): Understanding the full scope of sources for current awareness

The main lessons learned from this three-month Research Focus, plus a thematic index to all content published, are listed in the report Insights and actions from the Research Focus "Content and technology for current awareness". Visit the Research Focus page to get your copy.

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