16 Dec 09 Six-month Review of ALA Connect

In the Requirements Document written for ALA Connect in May 2008, eleven measures were listed for evaluating the success of ALA Connect at the six-month mark. This report, first presented to the ALA Board on October 24, 2009, represents our evaluation of the project to date, according to those measures.

Although we installed Google Analytics in June, the types of statistics it provides don’t tell us very much. It’s good to know the numbers of pageviews and visitors are continuously increasing, but those kinds of generic numbers don’t tell us how folks are actually using the site. In order to get the kinds of statistics we needed, especially for the six-month review, we built our own custom Drupal module for statistical reporting. The bulk of the numbers in this review come from that module, which is available in real-time for any ALA staff member to view….

View the full report (PDF, 9MB)

General conclusion: Connect has been successful and should continue to see cyclical growth as we move further into phase two. We met six of the eleven goals, with three of the remaining measures no longer being applicable and one waiting on an accessibility review from ASCLA. There’s really only one goal we didn’t meet (#4, content activity), but even that one could be considered a success.

We’ll do a follow-up report like this one at the one-year mark in April 2010, and of course we’ll post it here on the blog. Questions? Comments?

Tags: ala connect, drupal, statistics