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September 20, 2012

A year of discussion with VCH leaders

It’s been nearly a year since the Up for Discussion blog was launched. For those who haven’t checked it out yet, it’s a place where senior VCH leaders can “talk” directly with staff, sharing their thoughts and opinions and providing a safe place for staff members to do the same.

According to the Google Analytics tool we use to track activity on the blog, there have been over 33, 000 visits, over 100 posts and over 550 comments to date. Lately there’s been a flurry of interest in the blog posts about the new flu control policy, with comments both for and against. There have been recently some supportive comments about the value of the blog as a communication tool, and about the role of censorship. These are somewhat serious topics, but there’s a lighter side to the blog as well—check out Acronyms and abbreviations: OMG SMNP! and Life is going to the dogs.

If you’re not familiar with Up for Discussion, here are some links that will help you explore:

The anatomy of Up for Discussion

  • The authors
  • A list of all the posts
  • A list of the weekly poll questions with results
  • Comment of the Week editorials
  • Inside the Poll editorials
  • How to comment with class

Top 10 most commented posts:

  1. New flu control policy for staff a huge leap forward (56 comments)
  2. Life is going to the dogs (44 comments)
  3. Is a private health care system actually better than a public one? (33 comments)
  4. Why it’s not easy being green at work (22 comments)
  5. Why I believe “Home is Best” (21 comments)
  6. How would you recognize good work? (19 comments)
  7. First impressions are everything (19 comments)
  8. Very, very, unique. Really? Words that amuse and annoy (19 comments)
  9. Acronyms and abbreviations: OMG SMNP! (17 comments)
  10. Are you just talking to yourself? (17 comments)

Top 10 visited posts:

  1. New flu control policy for staff a huge leap forward
  2. Taking your own medicine
  3. Why I believe “Home is Best”
  4. Acronyms and abbreviations: OMG SMNP!
  5. Are you just talking to yourself?
  6. Is a private health care system actually better than a public one?
  7. Reporting the difficult news
  8. Life is going to the dogs
  9. My long dive into the unknown
  10. The sunshiners: frail old people living at home

What else?

  • Keep on reading and commenting.
  • Contact one of the authors and suggest a topic for them to blog about. Pick something that you know other employees would be interested in as well.
  • Leave a reply below and give us your feedback.

For more information contact: Editor

  1. Editor

    Thanks very much Glen, for the questions. You asked about the activity on the Up for Discussion blog and also about the VCH News we send on Thursdays. I’ll address both.

    Up for Discussion
    The 33,761 visits are for the period Oct. 24, 2011 to Sept. 19, 2012. Of those, 14,283 were unique visitors, meaning the system recognized these visitors as coming to the site from different computers or locations. I understand there is some margin of error with this unique visitor tracking of VCH users due to the way the computer systems and networks function, but 14,283 is what the web tracking shows. Pages were visited an average of 2.66 times each and that’s where 89,739 comes from. Visitors stayed on a page for an average of 3 minutes. The “bounce rate” was 50%, meaning that half the people who entered the site left after they had viewed that page and did not explore the rest of the site.

    About VCH News
    The VCH News email newsletter is the main way that we share news with staff and also the way that we link staff to the Up for Discussion blog, using links to the new blog posts for the week. There are three local editions of VCH News sent out each Thursday for the Vancouver, Richmond and Coastal communities of care. Each edition contains the same regional news, followed by a section of local news. There were 3,374 visits to VCH News since the last edition was sent on September 20.

    I hope this information helps. Thanks again for your interest.

    September 24, 2012

  2. Glen Garrick

    I just read your story “A year of discussion with VCH leaders.”

    I see it has generated 33,000 visits to date.

    Can you tell me what time frame that is for those visits?

    What about the number of unique visits to date? Per issue?

    And can you tell me how many newsletters go out each Thursday? Just curious on the market size.

    My team runs the GreenCare “Cut the Carbon Community (C3)” social media website and I’d like to compare the numbers.

    Thx.

    Glen Garrick

    September 24, 2012