We care, honest!
- career
My boss and I are moving divisions next week. We are currently working in the centre of the Scottish Government, the Office of the Chief Statistician. This will change as we are getting moved away from the centre to a policy area, Communities Analytical Services, the poverty statisticians. This makes sense, since what my boss and I do is identify areas in Scotland that have concentrations of deprivation. It will be good to work near the people who know all about the different facets of poverty. This also means that we have to leave our nice office in the city centre and commute to Leith instead, 3 miles north.
We were invited to give a talk next week to our new division about what we do, as a way to introduce ourselves. I will talk a little about user engagement, my boss will talk about everything else. User engagement means that we would like to be in contact with the people who use our statistics. These are local authority officials, NHS analysts, academics and students, lay people working for charities, and individual members of the public who want to know how deprived their area is.
We basically would like to know how we can help, and what we can do better.
User engagement is considered good practice among statisticians, and we engage with our users in many ways: through our website, on Twitter, through a newsletter, and through many calls and emails we receive on a daily basis. We also organise training events to explain to people how to use our data and the tools we provide correctly, and how to do their own analysis.
Today, I was preparing my slides on user engagement for our presentation next week. At the same time I was organising a number of training events we are running next month, and dealing with many email requests. Everyone is awfully nice and polite in their emails, and so I was surprised when I received a rather direct email from a disgruntled member of a local authority who was unhappy about the selection of training event locations. While I appreciated his point I thought his tone was inappropriate. I turned around in my chair to share my indignation with my colleagues. I read the email to them, ranted for a bit, we made a bit fun of the man, and so I turned an unpleasant email into an opportunity for a pleasant chat with the colleagues.
Having vented that way, I turned back to my desk and my presentation, only to look at my screen which said in large letters: User engagement - why we care.
We were invited to give a talk next week to our new division about what we do, as a way to introduce ourselves. I will talk a little about user engagement, my boss will talk about everything else. User engagement means that we would like to be in contact with the people who use our statistics. These are local authority officials, NHS analysts, academics and students, lay people working for charities, and individual members of the public who want to know how deprived their area is.
We basically would like to know how we can help, and what we can do better.
User engagement is considered good practice among statisticians, and we engage with our users in many ways: through our website, on Twitter, through a newsletter, and through many calls and emails we receive on a daily basis. We also organise training events to explain to people how to use our data and the tools we provide correctly, and how to do their own analysis.
Today, I was preparing my slides on user engagement for our presentation next week. At the same time I was organising a number of training events we are running next month, and dealing with many email requests. Everyone is awfully nice and polite in their emails, and so I was surprised when I received a rather direct email from a disgruntled member of a local authority who was unhappy about the selection of training event locations. While I appreciated his point I thought his tone was inappropriate. I turned around in my chair to share my indignation with my colleagues. I read the email to them, ranted for a bit, we made a bit fun of the man, and so I turned an unpleasant email into an opportunity for a pleasant chat with the colleagues.
Having vented that way, I turned back to my desk and my presentation, only to look at my screen which said in large letters: User engagement - why we care.