What’s in an answer?

So, back in March this year, we surveyed you about the AAIR website, and we received a healthy 101 responses. Thank you to everyone who participated, as your feedback was really useful in helping us to make the website a valuable resource for all of our visitors.

Speaking of the website, I am sure that everyone has checked out the new website and seen what an improvement it is! Surprisingly however, there were eight respondents who claim to have never visited the AAIR website. We did however find that 80% of visitors go to our website via links in our direct mail, and 60% of visitors going directly to the homepage as needed (multiple responses were invited for the question, ‘How do you visit the AAIR website?’).

I think we now have a modern and visually appealing website that provides useful and relevant information, is user-friendly, and much less cluttered than our previous website. I would like to thank all involved, and in particular Liesha Northover, our Executive Officer, and Dave Marr, our Immediate Past President, for all the work they did during the initial concepts, design, development and implementation phases, and in getting the site live so that you can now enjoy your browsing experience even more. If you haven’t checked it out, you should! Go to www.aair.org.au.

Now, back to the results of the survey and how we used the valuable information you provided in developing the new website. Several people mentioned that the entry page was cluttered and that it was difficult to find anything. We hope that you agree with us that the revised entry page has made a difference. Event listings were particularly mentioned as being important, with a weighted average of 4.06 in terms of its value to visitors, and so that section has been completely revamped and made more easily searchable with the inclusion of filters and added interactivity. The accessibility and functionality is a significant improvement on what we had previously, and we hope you enjoy the benefits and find an event to suit you.

In a similar vein, the Jobs Board was considered a useful part of the website, with survey results showing a weighted average of 3.60 in terms of its value to visitors. We have also made it easier for the user to submit their job vacancies via a form on our website. Further, we have added some generic IR job descriptions and would love your feedback on these. The Jobs Board and Submit Job pages are
available to both members and other visitors at all times; however, only members are directly alerted when a job is listed. If you are not on the direct mail list for receiving notifications of job listings, please consider becoming a member. If not, you are welcome to continue enjoying the benefits of the free information on our website, but you will only here about job vacancies once a month via the newsletter, and by then it might be too late to apply for that dream job!

We also noticed in the website survey results, that many of the people who responded weren’t aware whether they were members of AAIR or not. We have been looking at membership models recently, and our next big project will be to revamp our membership database, as part of a complete overhaul of our membership management.

So, there it is. You spoke and we listened! We updated the outdated. We cleared the clutter. And, we upsized the relevant content. But, if you do have any more feedback, I know Liesha will be pleased to hear it, so please email her at info@aair.org.au.

And finally, we have only received four anonymous pet peeves, but we’d love to share them with you now:

1. Tiny graphs on presentations, too many slides and going overtime. Also apologising for your talk or self-perceived lack of knowledge or if something goes wrong. Just move on!
2. Unnecessary level of accuracy in presenting data – think about whether you need any decimal points in those figures!
   …There is nothing like lots of numbers to 2 decimal points to have readers’ eyes glaze over. Just because it’s the default in Excel, doesn’t mean you have to keep it that way! ‘Numbers increased by 11%’ is a lot more useful to most people than ‘…11.23%’.
3. Inspired by the anonymous #1 pet peeve: When you are asked to present a proposed BI solution, and clearly state that the data in the presentation is indicative only, yet are instantly called out that the numbers are incorrect…completely derailing the meeting in one fell swoop
   …Basically occurs in all meetings involving Director/Executive level staff 🙂
4. Present data in presentation. Have a senior manager present a contradictory anecdote. Have group of senior managers nod in agreement. Try your very best to kindly suggest the boss is wrong.

Thank you so much to those four anonymous respondents…you know who you are. We felt your pain, but the corners of our mouths turned upwards as well…but only because we completely understand!

Our Pet Peeves Survey is still open for you to share your issues, so if anything is concerning you please do share.

Share Your Pet Peeves

Kathie Rabel

AAIR President