D Website improvement - Helpdesk Performance Report

Transcription

1 Grant Agreement number: Project acronym: ABEST II Project title: Argentinean Bureau for Enhancing Cooperation with the European Community in the Science, Technology and Innovation Area. Phase II Funding Scheme: INCO-BILAT D Website improvement - Helpdesk Performance Report Due date: 31/03/2011 (Month 18) Actual date: 30/11/2011 Document Author/s: MINCyT

2 Deliverable Fact Sheet Deliverable Version: 1.0 Deliverable Type: R / O Current Release Status: PP Final Release Status: PU Workpackage: WP2 Organisation Responsible: MINCyT Primary Contributor: MINCyT Reviewers: Actual Date of Delivery 30/11/2011 Audience Public Restricted Internal Version number Status Draft WP leader accepted Quality checked Project coordinator accepted 2

3 Executive Summary According to the definition of Task 2.3 of the DoW, MINCyT will lead the improvement of the website of ABEST II Project, with the idea of facilitating the mechanisms of communication by hiring a software supplier that implemented the modification and migration of the site to the domain This deliverable informs those updates, key tools to facilitate the project operations, and vital information for dissemination. 3

4 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION... 5 CHALLENGES FOUND... 5 RESULTS... 5 ANNEX 1: ACRONNYMS LIST

5 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Objectives in the context of ABEST II The new phase of the ABEST II website was conceived to improve what was carried out during the first phane of the project in order to provide a predominant space to news, call for fellowships, events, and different opportunities that our Liaison Office might offer. Therefore, it was decided to place the news section on the central part of the home page that we have been publishing whenever we had to announce an event or an opportunity appeared. On the other hand, within a tab called "calls" a friendly chart was designed to display each one of the calls corresponding to each of the areas, with its corresponding work Programme and Call fiche to be downloaded in a PDF format, as well as the NCP contact. In general, the aim of this website was to provide a useful tool for researchers and SMEs to easily identify funding opportunities and learn about all the news from our Office. 1.2 Main actions carried out in the firt two years of the project To accomplish our working schedule, the most important action was to upload periodically on the website the issues that were most requested by the Argentinean researchers, as the possibility to download the relevant documents on line, to obtain beforehand the agendas of each of the events, and to download the presentations of the and participants, find bases and forms of each of the calls, and provide simple guidelines to internalize the issues concerning the application of the different calls of the Seventh Framework Programme. In general lines, we tried to meet the main objectives of the projects presented in the Annex I and the expectations of the users of our programs by providing a neat, renovated, and efficient design, so that the site might dispel their doubts without resorting to the staff. CHALLENGES FOUND The biggest challenge that we found in this second phase of the project was to simplify all the information available from our office to deliver a seasy form to the researchers, since we know the difficulties that researchers meet when they first approach the different programs published by us. After having found an optimal structure, everything became easier, as our intention was to publish only what was really worth consulting, such as the registration for events, opening and closing of calls, etc. and to obviate information that sometimes was not of great interest to the general public, trying to redirect the consultations of the users that had a interest to our databases. RESULTS Through the application provided freely by google analytics, we may quantify the visits to our web site. In the last year, we received a total of 5,350 visits that remained in our web site an average of four minutes each. 5

6 Concerning the nationality of the visitors, it is worth mentioning that 85% of visits were made from our country, and the remaining 15% is divided among Spain, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, etc. The major peaks of visits are registered on occasion of the launching of the calls, as these represent real opportunities for researchers, since we noted the highest number of visits, on the days of the launching of our scholarships, both for Argentinean and European researchers, as in the launch of the COST program scholarships, and to a lesser extent, the launching of the info days of the work programs. Among other major results that we have registered in our site is the large number of subscribers to the newsletter to our ABEST account, when we load our bimonthly newsletter we have added a registration form which was welcome, with about a hundred new Researchers being added to our database. In total 12 news have been published in the central page of our website this year, related to concrete actions corresponding to activities implemented by our office, with satisfactory results as many of the researchers who participated in our calls attended our events or downloaded their forms, agendas, and presentations; which evidenced that having an updated page that could be modified from our job posts proved to be more dynamic than uploading the content from another sector of our institution; this issue was brought by the researchers in each one of the presentations of our activities. 6

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8 ANNEX 1: ACRONNYMS LIST ABEST II: Argentinean Bureau for Enhancing Cooperation with the European Community in the Science, Technology and Innovation Area. Phase II DOW: Document of Work FP7: Seventh Framework Programme NCPs: National Contact Points NIPs: National Institutional Points SME: Small and Medium Enterprises 8