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I’ve been playing around with our analytics for this year and thought these graphs might be worth sharing…
The vast majority of people are online during the working week. Apparently, in general, the majority of the community has better things to do with its weekend than join discussions about public policy. While no weekday fell below 16% of total visits to our sites, weekend visitation was just 6-7% of weekly visits. Keep in mind that this is across some 20-30 different projects with a broad issue spread (environmental, community services, infrastructure etc.) and metropolitan, regional and rural locations. It’s interesting to note that “hump day” (Wednesday) is the most popular day to join in an online conversation – this may reflect deeper issues to do with workplace boredom?
The second graph, visits by time of day, is the second plank in the argument that convenience is everything in making community engagement processes accessible. The vast majority of traffic is during the working day. Between 10am and 6pm, the proportion of visitors to our sites sits consistently between 7-8% of total traffic. There are notable shoulders at 8am and 7pm, and a gradual tailing off in the evening with very little overnight traffic – as you would expect. The point is, most people are clearly joining in these online conversations during working hours. They are taking a little bit of time out to get involved in public life and have a say about their community.
To paraphrase Bob Hawke, “Any boss who sacks a worker for taking 15 minutes to get involved in their local community is a bum.”
This work by Bang the Table Pty Ltd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License.