To ensure our Weekly Round-Up is as useful and relevant to all our friends & supporters, as well as the broader violence against women sector, AWAVA recently conducted a survey to get our readers thoughts and suggestions on what can be improved.

We greatly appreciate the time and effort our respondents put into their answers and hope to refine the Weekly Round-Up over the coming months. Below are some of the responses we received, and how we hope to implement some of your suggestions:

 

  • Scheduling: Currently we release the round-up on a Friday afternoon, corresponding with the work hours of our Administrative and Communications Assistant. Overwhelmingly people indicated it would be more useful to receive the round-up mid-week. As we hand over this role to a new staff member with new working days, we’ll endeavour to release the round-up earlier.

 

  • News: Most of our respondents agreed that the news section of our round-up was one of the most useful sections of our newsletter. People enjoyed reading the extended feature, but also sought local news relevant to their state and community. In the future, we intend to group state-based news items together so readers can more easily locate what’s relevant to them.

 

  • General Content: We received a lot of constructive feedback about the general type of content readers wanted to see. Generally, survey respondents wanted more content and events targeted towards different communities: migrant and refugee women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, women living in rural and remote areas. This also reflected another recommendation – our round-Up needs a stronger community voice.Given this feedback, we will be actively seeking to platform these voices and stories. We will be liaising with our Advisory Group members so we can more actively share their work, as well considering more content submissions from the broader community.Another recommendation was that we try and introduce more media formats in the round-up. Whilst we don’t have time to review every book or film, we will endeavour to introduce any especially relevant music videos, podcasts etc. AWAVA comes across.

 

  • Targeted resources: From your responses, we can see that our readers would benefit from us refining how we share resources. Often, we share what’s in the news or what we’ve found, which can lead to a variety of content. Instead, we are going to trial implementing a thematic each week, for example one week we may share resources relevant to disabled women, the next resources relevant to women living in poverty. We hope that organising resources this way may create resource banks relevant to different communities that are easier to access.

 

  • AWAVA’s work: Some respondents noted in our survey that they want to see us feature more of AWAVA’s work. Whilst we will often try to include news relevant to our work, we still want to ensure our round-up is as broad as possible and reflected of the sector, not just our organisation. If you want more updates on AWAVA’s work, you can always join us a Friend & Supporter. Likewise, we regularly update our website with any submissions, research & reports or blog posts AWAVA releases.

 

  • Formatting: As many of our readers access the round-up from their phones, a lot of people indicated we could better streamline our hyperlinking. Given this feedback, we will be changing the way we format links, adding a more here section at the end of news items for easier access.We were also reminded to avoid jargon where we can, which we will actively try and do. We want the content we share to be as accessible as possible for not only the sector, but the broader community.

 

  • Submitting to the Round-Up: As mentioned, our readers want greater access to submit relevant content to the round-up. If you would like to submit a particularly topical piece of news, research, report etc. please email to [email protected]. We cannot guarantee this will be included.


Once again, a big thanks from the AWAVA team to all those who responded to the survey. We hope the Weekly Round-Up continues to be a useful resource for advocacy work fighting violence against women.