After four and a half years as the Digital Strategy Manager at the The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), I am moving on to pastures new. My new role — at The Royal College of Psychiatrists — will probably feature in some future blog posts, but for now I wanted to reflect on my time at the ICR.

In particular I want to look back at three broad areas which have seen some notable changes while I have been at the helm of the ICR’s Digital Team. For some of these I also want to provide some explanation as to why things needed to change.

I’d like to extend my thanks to the amazing members of the Digital Team that I have worked with over the last few years, including several wonderful interns. They have all helped implement many of the changes that I talk about in this post.

1. Changes to editorial content

We have made lots of small changes to how our news items, blog posts, and feature articles have appeared. These mostly include adding more things to each article:

Hero images at the top of all editorial content
Crossheads in editorial content
Promo blocks (in-article indented sections to promote other parts of the website)
Hyperlinks to external sources (particularly for clinical trial information)
Tags

This can clearly be illustrated by comparing a typical recent news post with one from 2015. The goal of these changes was to make the content richer, more useful, and more engaging.

The last item on the list above — consistently tagging content — has enabled the development of dynamically updated landing pages for specific cancer types or research themes, e.g. brain cancer and genomics. This means that the small act of tagging content as we go, means we can aggregate content in different ways at a later date.

Another important change for our editorial content is that we applied to have it treated as a source of news by Google. This resulted in ICR stories not only showing up prominently in Google News, but also they can sometimes be included in the main Google search results for relevant queries:

Google search results for ‘cancer drugs’ in May 2019…showing news story on ICR website as second item in ‘Top stories’ section

This change led to a significant increase in traffic to the website from Google and is probably one of the biggest changes from the last few years that has hopefully attracted new users to the website.

2. Collecting more analytics data

We now have comparative data points for almost 1,200 pieces of editorial content. This has been achieved by logging how many page views each news item, blog post, or feature article has received in the first seven days it has been up on the website. We also have categorised each piece of content in a systematic way (e.g. research news items vs institutional announcement news item vs cancer awareness month blog post etc.)

This has produced a rich resource which has been able to quantify how our content has improved over time (as well as tracking how our output has changed over time). The categorisation has also enabled us clearly compare the success/failure of content in a like-for-like manner (e.g. policy-related stories can be compared to other policy-related stories).

If you don’t have a way of quantifying whether your content is good or bad, then it is very hard to make meaningful changes without being able to measure the influence of those changes.

For social media, I developed an internal metric to measure the monthly performance of our social media posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. This metric ends up being a very large number which mostly captures the reach of our posts but also factors in engagement on social media platforms.

This involves calculating the reach of all posts on each platform in any given month, and then increasing that number by the engagement rate of posts on that platform (there’s a few other things going on as well but this describes the essence of it).

The real utility of developing metrics like this is in being able to look at trends over long time periods.

This internal metric was complemented by registering the ICR to be tracked by EduRank, an independent social media benchmarking service for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).

It was pleasing to see that my internal metric related well to our monthly EduRank ranking. It has also been pleasing to see that as a smaller HEI — with very few students — we typically ranked in the top 25% of the more than 200 HEIs tracked by EduRank.

3. New ways of reaching audiences

We launched an Instagram channel in late 2016, which has now grown to have almost 2,500 followers. This platform was subsequently recognised in 2019 as being one of the top ten cancer centres on Instagram.

We also launched an Apple News channel, making the ICR one of of only two cancer research organisations to have a presence on this platform (or at least as far as I can tell…the other one is the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute).

Doing more with our existing platforms

On our existing social media platforms we have embraced the use of infographics and I have occasionally tried making short animations to try to succinctly explain some details of our big news stories. Here is one of my favourite ones about an artificial intelligence approach that tries to predict how cancers might evolve.

We flirted with using Storify for a time to collate together all of our social media — and the resulting media coverage — around our big news stories. Storify is no more but Twitter Moments has been a good substitute (a recent Moment looked at how ICR staff were coping with working at home).

We have also launched a series of email newsletters providing another route to share news and updates from the ICR.

One final innovation that I will highlight here is the change to creating short videos with ICR scientists at conferences. Modern smart phones can produce completely acceptable video quality, especially for use on social media. If you add a cheap (as little as £10) lapel mic, you can record suitable quality audio too.

I have recorded several of these videos at conferences and have always been able to edit them (just using iMovie on my iPhone) and then publish them to social media on the same day they were filmed. E.g. here is the ICR’s Professor Ros Eeles captured at the NCRI 2019 conference last year.

On the topic of the NCRI conference, I’m insanely proud for spotting the opportunity to have some fun with the big #NCRI hashtag sign that was set up during the conference. Couldn't miss this opportunity for some ICR branding!

The evolving digital landscape

It’s been an exciting time at the ICR and hopefully some of the changes that I have helped introduce will continue to have a positive influence for a while longer. However, the nature of digital platforms is that things are always in flux.

An approach that works well today may become irrelevant in a year’s time. There will be new social media platforms in future and existing ones will continue to evolve. Legal frameworks — such as those that relate to GDPR and accessibility — are also drivers of change across the digital landscape and organisations have to be responsive to changes in the law.

It feels hard to know exactly how we will all be using websites and other digital platforms in the near future. It is safe to say though, that things will be different and I very much look forward to finding out what lies ahead!