2019: Increasing our digital reach by Emma Barrett
Date: 07 Jan 2020
Author: Emma Barrett
FSRH achieved a lot in 2019, not least a big jump in its digital engagement across website, social media and e-newsletters.
As a membership body with 15,000 members, a lot of our members only experience the FSRH through our online channels. We are continually striving to improve our website and communications, to help keep our members informed and to promote what we do to stakeholders.
We have a small staff team here at FSRH who are tasked with membership engagement. There are 7 of us in the Membership Engagement team, each of us tasked with specific areas of work including publicising our work, organising and delivering conferences, managing our website and social media presence and communicating with our membership. We also develop digital platforms, manage integrations between systems and ensure that we communicate with our 15,000 members and 20+ committees regularly.
2019 saw us undertaking a lot of work to develop our internal ways of working as well as systems and processes that will stand us in good stead ahead of our 2020 strategic plans. Much of this work was in training staff in the office to use new systems, developing better reporting across teams and a definite move towards data-focussed decision-making. All of this is helping us to reach our members more effectively. We still have work to do in this area but we are seeing returns on our efforts already. I’m excited about what 2020 holds for us.
Here’s some highlights….
Website
2019 saw a 79% increase in webpage views compared to 2018. We achieved over 3.3 million page views of our website in 2019.
Our website’s five most popular blogs of 2019 were:
- Contraception Mythbusters: It is not safe to take COC continuously without a monthly break written by CSRH Trainee Savita Brito-Mutunayagam.
- Dr Katie Boog on Contraception for Women Aged over 40 Years
- Myth: Antibiotics stop combined hormonal contraception from working by the CEU.
- A good night's rest: sleep problems and the menopause by Dr Heather Currie.
- Young people and cancer: contraception and HRT by Vikram Talaulikar.
e-Newsletters and Membership Engagement
2019 saw a change in how we deliver our membership e-newsletters. This has resulted in more regular communication with our members in turn driving better communication with our members.
As a result:
- We achieved a 13% increase in applications for our committee vacancies.
- We achieved an open rate of 35% for our regular membership e-newsletter, the industry standard is below 25%. We hope to improve upon this in 2020.
Social Media Growth
We have grown significantly across social media and we hope to build on this success in 2020.
- Our facebook page likes doubled to over 1000 in 2019.
- Our twitter followers grew by 20% to over 4,700 in 2019.
- Our LinkedIn page now has over 275 followers and we plan to grow this in 2020.
What’s next for us in 2020?
We plan to build on these successes in 2020 with a focus on developing our digital capabilities this year. We will be launching our new Diploma in 2020 with associated new online platform to deliver e-learning – which provide a CPD diary for all members wanting to track their SRH learning. We also plan to pilot a new way of delivering committee administration to some selected committees to make the workload for both committee members and staff easier. This year we will also be making some internal changes to how we undertake our day-to-day and we will be exploring cloud-based systems for collaborative working and video conferencing.
It’s going to be an exciting year of staff testing out solutions, analysing results and making decisions on the best way to work in the future. It’s an exciting time to work at FSRH and I’m looking forward to it!