The hub’s website and social media channels are key platforms of its digital presence.
A strategic decision was made to springboard from the existing National Environmental Science Program’s Northern Australia Environmental Resources Hub website rather than create new channels. This is maximising retention of Northern Hub visitors and followers, and facilitating new engagement beyond northern Australia.
After the launch of the hub website, equal proportions of web visitors have come predominantly from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, compared to the Brisbane and Darwin majority for the Northern Australia Hub website. This expanded digital audience further complements existing researcher, institution and research-user networks.
This engagement will be further enhanced after the planned revamp of the hub website in 2022 and the archiving of former research program sites with the Atlas of Living Australia. The updated, streamlined hub website will be easier to navigate and feature landing pages for topics, places, news, resources, people and projects, allowing visitors to choose their points of entry and interest in hub activities and outcomes.
Ensuring that webpages for projects and key researchers were available as soon as possible after the launch of Research Plan 2021 was a priority for the hub knowledge brokering and communication team. The importance of and interest in these pages are reflected in their rankings as second and third most-popular pages on the website with ~570 visitors each (following the home page with ~3,000).
Preparing web visitors for future hub engagement has also been a focus, and through newsletter sign-up forms on the website and direct referral links on social media, 200 subscribers have been added to the hub newsletter mailing list – a strong indicator for future engagement as success stories from the Resilient Landscapes Hub are publicised. More than 60 additional people registered for the hub’s graphics library, and there was an increase of 150 followers on Twitter and a boost in reach (70%) of Facebook posts.
Data visualisation showing which webpages were visited the most (size of circle) and how long visitors spent on each page (colour of circle).
