Our Year in Blogging!
Jessica Juckes, International Training Programme Assistant
Happy New Year to our ITP fellows and followers,
We are happy to announce that 2017 was the busiest year yet for the ITP blog, in terms of posts, views, visitors and interaction!
Overall, 53,288 words were posted on our blog this year – phew!
We posted 139 times – a 53% increase on 2016, and a 70.5% increase on 2015!
From September onwards, we began posting regularly from Monday to Friday, with recurring features including ‘A Year on From’, ‘Catching Up’, ‘Out & About’ and ‘International Days’: read more about this here.
Listening to the insights you gave us at the end of 2016, we have been highlighting more UK and programme partner news, and we have also received many more posts written by fellows.
Frequency of posts over the past 6 months
The ITP blog was viewed 25,688 times in 2017. That’s a 34.5% increase over two years!
December 2017 was our busiest month ever on the blog, with 3,400 views. Coming second was July 2017, during the summer programme, with 3,200 views.
The most popular day ever on the blog was Saturday 9 December 2017 – the day after the end of our second ITP+ course in Photography and Documentation, having posted a selection of images from the week’s activities.
The top ten most popular posts over 2017 included information on post-fellowship opportunities (such as ITP+ courses, Senior Fellow applications and the upcoming Aswan conference), but also posts written by your ITP colleagues, including Hayk Mkrtchyan (ITP 2014, Armenia/Senior Fellow 2017), Norhan Hassan Salem (ITP 2017, Egypt) and Barbara Vujanovic (ITP 2016, Croatia). And of course, some hellos and goodbyes in the ITP team – notably the farewell from Emma Croft.
We had 7,515 visitors over the year – up by nearly 1000 on 2016, with a 30.6% increase in visitors over two years.
You gave us 47 likes on the blog – up from 28 last year.
The number of comments also increased – 78 comments, after 70 in 2016 – but we know we can do even better in 2018!
Of course this doesn’t include the great reception you have also given the blog posts through the ITP Facebook group.
Thank you to our top five most active commenters on the blog:
Njeri Gachihi (ITP 2010, Kenya/Senior Fellow 2016)
Shambwaditya Ghosh (ITP 2012, India/Senior Fellow 2015)
Eileen Musundi (ITP 2008, Kenya/Senior Fellow 2013)
Saadu Rashid (ITP 2012, Kenya)
Gilda Jorge (ITP 2009, Mozambique)
Here are the top twenty countries from which people viewed the blog over the past year:
Also a big thank you to everyone in the network who contributed a blog post over the last six months, since we launched the ‘Dynamic Blog‘:
Zohreh Baseri (ITP 2007, Iran)
Meltem Yasdag (ITP 2011, Turkey)
Ishaq Mohammed Bello (ITP 2012, Nigeria)
Abiti Nelson (ITP 2013, Uganda)
Rige Shiba (ITP 2013, India)
Costas Vasiliadis (ITP 2014, Greece)
Hayk Mkrtchyan (ITP 2014, Armenia/Senior Fellow 2017)
Yolanda Theodoropoulou (ITP 2016, Greece)
Dora Jok (ITP 2016, Malaysia)
Ruchira Verma (ITP 2016, India)
Shreen Amin (ITP 2016, Egypt)
Saeed Bayashoot (ITP 2016, Yemen) – with two posts!
Barbara Vujanovic (ITP 2016, Croatia)
Yara Abbas (ITP 2016, Palestine)
Chithra Kallur (ITP 2017, India)
Ala Talebian (ITP 2017, Iran) – with two posts!
Not to mention Patrick Bresnahan (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) and Manuela Lehmann (British Museum)
Is your ITP year/country missing from the list of contributors? If so, the ITP network would love to hear from you in 2018!
We hope you have enjoyed the ITP blog in 2017, both as a resource and a networking platform, and we look forward to the opportunities for dialogue and collaboration that it will bring us throughout this new year.