The OHBM Community Communications Survey 2022: Results and Outlook
OHBM is a member-driven organization. For example, many of the Special Interest Group (SIGs) and committees, were established directly in a response to member feedback. One way of collecting member feedback is through community surveys, such as the 2021 Diversity and Inclusivity survey or the 2018 Aperture survey.
In 2022 the Communications Committee sent all members of OHBM a survey inquiring about their use of communication channels available within the community. We hoped the responses would help us “improve the OHBM experience” by identifying ways in which to reach out to and engage with a wider audience. Over the last two years, significant efforts have gone into parsing and analyzing the data we received, however, the process proved more challenging than expected.
Thankfully, our labor paid off, leading to an important improvement in how we communicate with the community: We developed the OHBMontly newsletter, a digest that highlights important events and opportunities to the OHBM community. The results of our analyses are available for viewing in a semi-interactive Jupyter notebook and on github. There we highlight key findings, with the hope that our experience will guide future OHBM survey efforts and improve the process by which leadership considers member feedback.
Below we present:
The main findings and impact of the survey
An In-depth analyses of the survey outcome, and
Take-home messages for ourselves for future surveys
Main findings
In total, 311 people responded to the survey, across different continents and career stages:
Geographic Location Career Stage
There was a geographical bias towards Europe and North America. Professionally, PhD students, postdocs and tenured staff were better represented than undergraduates and junior faculty.
The meeting in Glasgow was unlike many other OHBM annual meetings, as it was the first meeting with an in person component following 2 years of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many were eager to interact with their colleagues in person. In the meantime, a lot had changed during the pandemic: in addition to the profound changes many of us experienced in our personal and professional lives, OHBM itself had pivoted (and iterated) in the face of the rapidly changing public health guidance. Alongside entirely new platforms like Sparkle, the OHBM community coalesced around other publicly-available platforms such as Twitter, which brought new opportunities and important challenges in developing scientific community.
One of the main questions was therefore: how do access and receive news and information about OHBM and which channels do you actively use? The results show that the more traditional forms of content—the OHBM website and emails—are the preferred method for accessing community-specific information. At the time, X (previously Twitter, was the preferred social-media platform for receiving OHBM relevant information; however, in the last few years, several individuals have left the platform, so this preference may no longer be relevant.
This result, combined with the free-form comments at the end of the survey requesting fewer emails with more items per mail, and an easier-to-use website, led to the development of the OHBMontly newsletter, with news items from all over the community, accessible as a bulleted list right in your email inbox. In addition to providing a monthly comprehensive update to the community, the newsletter also served to ensure that activities and information became more visible and accessible to the greater community. We hope that this addition has had a noticeable influence on how you communicate with OHBM.
A more detailed look
This link to the Jupyter notebook should provide more in-depth analyses, as well as to allow users to with the plots! Some of the results worth mentioning:
Twitter (X) was a popular information channel at the time of the survey, with almost half of those who responded saying they use it for reading about OHBM. However, the question about Twitter use was answered with “I don’t use Twitter” just as often as “I follow OHBM actively on Twitter”. In other words: for those who use Twitter, the OHBM account is a handy source of information, but half of the community never uses it.
Content in the different channels is followed actively in the time leading up to the Annual Meeting, and content about the meeting is valued positively.
The podcast and blog had lower attendance than the website, but were highly valued. Linkedin, Facebook and YouTube usage depends on having an account on these channels.
We leave the interpretations of these interactions to you! And once again, please feel free to open the notebook and allow yourself to produce your own results. If you think they are interesting, we would love to know!
Lessons for future surveys
Little did we know that the analysis of these data would take place over more than a year. Of course, it did not take that long to set up the newsletter, so we were able to produce actionable change as a result of the survey. Some challenges included having categorical answers that were not ordered and working around missing data.
Parsing data from many of the responses was more challenging than expected, prompting us to think about ways in which to design future surveys that lend themselves to more accessible and interpretable data analysis, Which can make the analyses less straightforward than comparing correlations in brain image analysis! It is all a lot easier if you know how to do data science in Python:
Python by an old-school programmer Python by a data scientist
Difficulties aside, we do believe the survey gave us good insight into where to focus and where to put in effort for reaching out. We learned from this experience and would like to solicit suggestions for future OHBM surveys so we can more effectively incorporate feedback from the members. We would like to hear from you, the members of OHBM: if you have suggestions for improving the next survey please share them with us by emailing ohbm.comcom@gmail.com!
Happy interacting with the notebook and please get in contact if you have great suggestions for the survey!